Investigating the optical NOR gate using plasmonic nanorods

Summary In this paper, a coherent perfect absorption‐type NOR gate based on plasmonic nano particles is proposed. It consists of two plasmonic nanorod arrays on top of two serial arms with quartz substrate. The operation principle is based on the absorbable formation of a conductive path in the dielectric layer of a plasmonic nanoparticle waveguide. Because the coherent perfect absorption efficiency depends strongly on the number of plasmonic nanorods and the locations of nanorods, an efficient binary optimization method based the Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm is used to design an optimized array of the plasmonic nanorods in order to achieve the maximum absorption coefficient in the ‘off’ state and the minimum absorption coefficient in the ‘on’ state. In Binary Particle Swarm Optimization, a group of birds consists a matrix with binary entries, control the presence (‘1’) or the absence (‘0’) of nanorods in the array. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.