Energy- and time-controlled switching of ultrashort pulses in nonlinear directional plasmonic couplers

We propose an ultracompact nonlinear plasmonic directional coupler for switching of ultrashort optical pulses. We show that this device can be used to control the routing of ultrashort pulses using either the energy or the duration of each individual pulse as switching parameters. The coupler is composed of two cores of a nonlinear dielectric material embedded into metallic claddings. The intricate nonlinear spatiotemporal dynamics of the system is simulated by the finite-difference time-domain technique.