Multifunctional disk device for optical switch and temperature sensor

A multifunctional surface plasmon polariton disk device coupled by two metal?insulator?metal (MIM) waveguides is proposed and investigated numerically with finite-difference time-domain simulation. It can be used as optical switch and temperature sensor by filling disk with liquid crystal and ethanol, respectively. The simulation results demonstrate that the transmission characteristics of an optical switch can be manipulated by adjusting the radius of disk and the slit width between disk and MIM waveguides. The transmittance and modulation depth of optical switch at 1550?nm are up to 64.82% and 17.70?dB, respectively. As a temperature sensor, its figure of merit can reach 30.46. In this paper, an optical switch with better efficiency and a temperature sensor with better sensitivity can be achieved.