Self-Heating and Cooling of Active Plasmonic Waveguides

Loss compensation in plasmonic nanostructures gives a possibility to avoid problems with strong absorption in the metal and design deep-subwavelength optical components for practical applications. At the same time, pumping required for creation of population inversion produces a huge amount of waste heat, which can significantly increase the device temperature and degrade its performance. Eventually, self-heating is becoming a severe problem for active plasmonics, since it limits the maximum achievable optical gain. Here we report a comprehensive study of heat generation and transport in electrically pumped active plasmonic waveguides, in which the SPP propagation losses are compensated by gain in the adjacent semiconductor and present a strategy for their efficient cooling.