Plasmonics is increasingly attracting the attention of the communications community as it promises ultra-compact size, fast speed and lowest power consumption. And indeed, devices with 500 GHz bandwidth on the micrometerscale with fJ/bit operation have already been demonstrated. Yet, plasmonics also offers challenges such as high losses and critical fabrication tolerances. The talk will review the status of latest plasmonic devices for communications and recent trends.

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Bio

Juerg Leuthold is the head of the Institute of Electromagnetic Fields (IEF) at ETH Zurich, Switzerland since 2013. His interest are in the field of Photonics, Plasmonics and Microwave with an emphasis on applications in communications and sensing. In the time from 2004 until 2013 he was affiliated with the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany, where he was the Head of the Institute of Photonics and Quantum Electronics (IPQ) and the Helmholtz Institute of Microtechnology (IMT). From 1999 to 2004, he was affiliated with Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, Holmdel, NJ, USA, where he performed device and system research with III/V semiconductor and silicon optical bench materials for applications in high-speed tele­communications. Juerg Leuthold received the Ph.D. degree in physics from ETH Zurich in Switzerland for work in the field of integrated optics and all-optical communications in 1998.