The main goal of this PhD is to develop the semi-analytical and the numerical tools that allow us to study complicated and realistic nonlinear plasmonic waveguides which can be fabricated and characterized experimentally.First, we present a full study of an improved version of the one-dimensional nonlinear plasmonic slot waveguide, by adding two linear dielectric buffer layers between the isotropic nonlinear core and the two metal claddings. These additional layers reduce the overall losses and allow the losses to decrease with the power for some configurations unlike the usual slot. Furthermore, the main plasmonic modes can exhibit nonlinear spatial modal transitions towards new families of modes that can be controlled with the power.Second, we propose and study new one-dimensional nonlinear plasmonic slot waveguides with metamaterial regions either in the nonlinear core or in the linear claddings. For the metamaterial nonlinear core, we developed semi-analytical and fully numerical methods in order to study the nonlinear stationary solutions propagating in this anisotropic nonlinear waveguide. We have demonstrated both analytically and numerically that the anisotropic nonlinear core can be designed in order to achieve strong nonlinear effects at low power.For the structures with metamaterial linear claddings, the figure of merit can be extremely enhanced by more than 50 times compared with the simple one. Finally, we present the full derivation of a new nonlinear full vectorial finite element method based on the fixed power algorithm in order to quantify rigorously the nonlinear characteristics of realistic two-dimensional nonlinear plasmonic structures.

This book provides researchers at the forefront of nonlinear optical technologies with robust procedures and software for the systematic investigation of the fundamental phenomena in nonlinear optical waveguide structures. A full vectorial electromagnetic formulation is adopted and the conditions under which simplification to a scalar formulation is possible are clearly indicated. The need to model the dielectric saturation properly is identified, and improved algorithms are presented for obtaining the complete power dispersion curve of structures exhibiting bistability. As the stability analysis of nonlinear modes is crucial to the development of nonlinear model methods, an effective procedure to investigate the propagation of the scalar nonlinear waves in 3D is another important feature of the book. All of the procedures described, as well as an automatic mesh generator for the finite element method, are incorporated into a software package which is included with this book.

Plasmonics is an important branch of optics concerned with the interaction of metals with light. Under appropriate illumination, metal nanoparticles can exhibit enhanced light absorption, becoming nanosources of heat that can be precisely controlled. This book provides an overview of the exciting new field of thermoplasmonics and a detailed discussion of its theoretical underpinning in nanophotonics. This topic has developed rapidly in the last decade, and is now a highly-active area of research due to countless applications in nanoengineering and nanomedicine. These important applications include photothermal cancer therapy, drug and gene delivery, nanochemistry and photothermal imaging. This timely and self-contained text is suited to all researchers and graduate students working in plasmonics, nano-optics and thermal-induced processes at the nanoscale.

This volume collects a a number of contributions on spontaneous symmetry breaking. Current studies in this general field are going ahead at a full speed. The book present review chapters which give an overview on the major break throughs of recent years. It covers a number of different physical settings which are introduced when a nonlinearity is added to the underlying symmetric problems and its strength exceeds a certain critical value. The corresponding loss of symmetry, called spontaneous symmetry breaking, alias self-trapping into asymmetric states is extensively discussed in this book. The book presents both active theoretical studies of spontaneous symmetry breaking effects as well as experimental findings, chiefly for Bose-Einstein-Condensates with the self-repulsive nonlinearity, and also for photorefractive media in optics.

This contributed volume summarizes recent theoretical developments in plasmonics and its applications in physics, chemistry, materials science, engineering, and medicine. It focuses on recent advances in several major areas of plasmonics including plasmon-enhanced spectroscopies, light scattering, many-body effects, nonlinear optics, and ultrafast dynamics. The theoretical and computational methods used in these investigations include electromagnetic calculations, density functional theory calculations, and nonequilibrium electron dynamics calculations. The book presents a comprehensive overview of these methods as well as their applications to various current problems of interest.

This book, edited by two of the most respected researchers in plasmonics, gives an overview of the current state in plasmonics and plasmonic-based metamaterials, with an emphasis on active functionalities and an eye to future developments. This book is multifunctional, useful for newcomers and scientists interested in applications of plasmonics and metamaterials as well as for established researchers in this multidisciplinary area.