Widely tunable thermo-optic plasmonic bandpass filter

We report thermally tunable optical bandpass filters based on long-range surface plasmon polariton waveguides. A thin gold stripe in the waveguide core is surrounded by dielectric layers with dissimilar refractive index dispersions and dissimilar thermo-optic coefficients. High filter transmission is achieved for a wavelength at which the refractive indices of the upper and lower cladding layers are identical, and this spectral point may be changed by varying the filter temperature. Experimentally, over 220 nm of bandpass tuning is achieved around 1550 nm wavelength by varying the device temperature from 19 to 27 °C.