Design methodology for all-optical bistable switches based on a plasmonic resonator sandwiched between dielectric waveguides

We present a bistable device consisting of a Bragg grating resonator with a Kerr medium sandwiched between two dielectric slab waveguides. The resonator is situated in a nanometer-scaled metal?insulator?metal plasmonic waveguide. Due to the dimensional confinement from the dielectric waveguide to the nanoscaled plasmonic waveguide, electric fields are enhanced greatly, which will further reduce the threshold value. Moreover, a semi-analytic method, based on the impedance theory and the transfer matrix method, is developed to study the transmission and reflection spectra as well as the bistability loop of such a switch. Our method is fast and accurate, as confirmed by the finite-difference time-domain simulation.