Local plasmon photonic transistor

A proposal for a photonic transistor is made and some basic proving experiments are described. These experiments show that by focusing two laser beams (405 and 635 nm) in one small spot on a high-speed rotating optical disk, a large signal enhancement is observed. It was found that a plasmon interaction generated between a silver light-scattering center and recorded small marks in the optical disk with a super-resolution near-field structure produced the large signal amplification in the spot (<1 mum). A modulated signal of the blue laser was enhanced by 60 times by controlling the red laser power from 1.5 to 3.5 mW. It has been shown that the system has the potential to realize all-thin-films photonic transistors by using local plasmon amplification. (C) 2001 American Institute of Physics.