Optofluidic tunable plasmonic filter based on liquid-crystal microcavity structures

A theoretical demonstration of Optofluidic tunable wavelength filter in the near-infrared regime has been presented. By incorporating nematic liquid crystal (LC) into the slot resonator, a nanoscale LC optical filter is proposed and numerically investigated. The finite difference time domain method is used to simulate the optical characteristics of the plasmonic nanostructure. Two approaches are considered to tune the filter's resonant wavelength, a fine tuning based on optofluidic control LC length and a coarse tuning based on LC birefringence. Both fine tuning and coarse tuning are successful for manipulating the filter's resonant wavelength. This plasmonic structure permits the high-precision control of transmit of the input surface plasmon polaritons. The filters may have important potential application in highly integrated optical circuits.