Development of nano-photonic devices and their integration by optical near field

Ultrahigh integration of photonic switching arrays is necessary to increase data transmission rates and capacity of future optical transmission system. To accomplish this, the size of all switching devices must be reduced beyond the diffraction limit of light. We have already proposed a nano-photonic integrated circuit (IC) that is composed of nanometer-scale dots and wires. For the works of nano-photonics, a key device is a probe for generating/detecting optical near field with high efficiency and high resolution. To meet this requirement, we realized the successful fabrication of an optical near-field probe with extremely high throughput and small spot size, produced by introducing a pyramidal silicon structure and localized surface plasmon resonance at the metallized probe tip.