Voltage Controlled Beam Steering by Metal-Insulator-Metal Slit Array Filled with Nonlinear Optical Polymer

A structure capable of focusing and bending electromagnetic (EM) waves is proposed to manipulate the propagation of light beam. The EM wave transports through the tuning slits in the form of surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs), and gets the required phase retardations by tuning the applied voltage based on the electro-optical effect. Due to the subwavelength and aperiodic nature of planar metallic array, we present the rigorous electromagnetic analysis by using two dimensional (2D) finite difference time domain (FDTD) method. The results show that, by adjusting the applied voltage properly, the beam focusing and splitting phenomena can be easily implemented. In combination with previous studies, it is expected that our results could lead to realization of optimum designs of actively-controlled plasmonic devices.