Noise reduction in plasmonic amplifiers

Abstract

Surface plasmon polariton amplification gives the possibility to overcome strong absorption in the metal and design truly nanoscale devices for on-chip photonic circuits. However, the process of stimulated emission in the gain medium is inevitably accompanied by spontaneous emission, which greatly increases the noise power. Here we present an efficient strategy for noise reduction in plasmonic amplifiers, which is based on gain redistribution along the amplifier. We show that even a very little gain redistribution (~3%) gives the possibility to increase the signal-to-noise ratio by about 100% and improve the bit error ratio by orders of magnitude.