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A compound figure of merit for photonic applications of metal nanocomposites

Hernando Garcia, Hare Krishna, Ramki Kalyanaraman

cond-mat.mtrl-sciarXiv:cond-mat/0609176

Abstract

Selecting nanocomposites for photonic switching applications requires optimizing their thermal, nonlinear and two-photon absorption characteristics. We simplify this step by defining a compound figure of merit (FOMC) for nanocomposites of noble metals in dielectric based on criteria that limit these structures in photonic applications, i.e. thermal heating and two-photon absorption. The device independent results predict extremely large values of FOMC for a specific combination of the metal and insulator dielectric constant given by εh=ε1-ε22, where εh is the dielectric constant of the host and ε1 and ε2 are the real and imaginary parts for the metal.

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