Compact Circuit Models for Nanoantenna-Based Lightwave Electronics

Abstract

As the field of nanoscale lightwave electronics matures from centering around fundamental science to focusing on device engineering, there is a growing need for compact models that can provide rapid and scalable quantitative analysis of the performance of petahertz-frequency optical-field-driven electronics. In this work, we developed a circuit model framework for describing nano-scale lightwave electronics. Our framework captures the physics governing nanoscale optical devices, such as electrically-connected nanoantennas, using compact circuit models that predict their electromagnetic response, their electron emission, and their charge transfer dynamics. This approach allows scalable simulation of large integrated systems containing networks of nanoscale lightwave electronic components, which is not possible using full-wave electromagnetic and particle-in-cell simulation methods. We implemented the compact model in an free commercial circuit solver (LTspice) and validated its electromagnetic response against a full-wave electromagnetic solver (MEEP). We propose an experiment to fully benchmark the model's ability to capture non-linear charge-transfer-based coupling between devices. The circuit model implementation speeds up the electromagnetic analysis from hours to seconds and accounts for charge-driven coupling, enabling rapid quantitative studies of device operation which provide new insights into how femtosecond signals propagate through nanoscale lightwave electronic structures. We anticipate that the methods we introduce here will become essential to the development and performance analysis of nanoscale lightwave electronics for communication, computation, and signal processing at optical frequencies.