Surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) beam filter (BF) and beam splitter (BS) constructed using metal heterostructures are proposed and demonstrated numerically. Both structures have a ring metal heterowaveguide, which is constructed by a metal cylinder and a ring dielectric cladding. The two-dimensional finite-difference time-domain (2D-FDTD) method is employed to study the properties of the proposed BF and BS, and the results show that SPPs can effectively propagate on bended plasmonic waveguides with dielectric claddings. By introducing dielectric and plasmonic waveguides on both sides of the resonant ring, SPPs can be efficiently excited at the output of the waveguide ring resonator (WRR) through mode coupling. The planar metal heterostructures provide a way for constructing various nanoscale counterparts of conventional planar integrated devices such as filters, splitters, resonators, sensors, optical switches, and so on.

A plasmonic band-pass filter based on graphene rectangular ring resonator with double narrow gaps is proposed and numerically investigated by finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) simulations. For the filter with or without gaps, the resonant frequencies can be effectively adjusted by changing the width of the graphene nanoribbon, the coupling distance and chemical potential of graphene. In addition, by introducing narrow gaps in the rectangular ring resonators, it shows the single frequency filtering effect. Moreover, the structure also shows high sensitivity fordifferent surrounding mediums. This work provides a novel method for designing all-optical integrated components in optical communication.

A new phenomenon of an obvious dip of the transmission from subwavelength slits can be obtained if we change the wavelength of the incident light in the visible regime is proposed. Theory shows that there exist maximumreflectivities if we change wavelengths for different slit widths. The theoretical results are consistent with both finite differencetime-domain (FDTD) simulations and experiments.

We propose a compact TM-pass polariser, consisting of silicon (Si)/silicon carbide (SiC)/Si layers. Two graphene sheets are sandwiched between the Si and SiC layers as the interlayer to enhance the interaction with light. The loss characteristics have been investigated by using the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method. The proposed structure exhibits a low insertion loss (IL) of $\sim 0.25 \rm{dB}$ and a high polarisation extinction ratio (PER) of $\sim 57 \rm{dB}$. To verify the robustness of the proposed polariser, we analyse the fabrication tolerance of the waveguide width and the height of the Si and SiC layers. The polariser shows great fabrication error tolerance. In addition, by employing a $100 \mu\rm{m}$ long waveguide, a PER of 48.3–59.4 dB is obtained in the visible regime ranging from 400 to 600 nm.