A simple perturbative tool to calculate plasmonic photonic bandstructures

Abstract We use first order perturbation theory to study the effect of surface plasmon polaritons on the photonic band structure of plasmonic photonic crystals. Our results are based on a simple numerical tool that we have developed to extend the standard frequency domain methods to compute the photonic band structure of plasmonic photonic crystals. For a two-dimensional honeycomb photonic crystal with a lattice constant of 500 nm placed on an aluminium substrate, we show that the band gap for TM modes is enhanced by 13%. Thus a slight variation in the effective dielectric function results in a plasmonic band structure that is not scale-invariant, which is reminiscent of the inherent non-linear properties of the effective dielectric constant.