R&D: Plasmonic Data Storage Based on Nematic Liquid Crystal Layers

Journal of Lightwave Technology has published an article written by Mahmoud A. El-Rabiaey, Centre for Photonics and Smart Materials, Zewail City of Science and Technology, Gizza, Egypt, Nihal F. F. Areed, Centre for Photonics and Smart Materials, Zewail City of Science and Technology, Gizza, Egypt – Faculty of Engineering, Mansoura University, Mansoura, Egypt, and Salah S. A. Obayya, Centre for Photonics and Smart Materials, Zewail City of Science and Technology, Gizza, Egypt.

Abstract: “In this paper, compact plasmonic data storage with high-speed sequential writing/reading rate has been proposed and numerically simulated using two-dimensional finite difference time domain method. The proposed storage is composed of a combination of two nematic liquid crystal (NLC) layers and nano-silver sheet perforated with two rectangular nano-holes. The suggested storage has been designed for storing visible light in one of the two nano-holes based on the biasing states of NLC layers. Tuning the dimensions of the proposed storage results in storing three different binary states ’01,’ ’10,’ and ’11’ with 0.4 power absorption efficiency, 13dB crosstalk and 1Gb/s sequential writing/reading rate. It is expected that such proposed two-bit binary storage can be used as a basic unit for constructing large scale storage device with high storage capacity and ultra-high bit rate.”