Plasmonic bistability in the nonlinear cylindrical metal-dielectric multilayers

We study the nonlinear cylindrical plasmonic waveguide arrays composed of the metal-dielectric multilayers with the Kerr-type nonlinear dielectric materials. The theory of the nonlinear propagation mode is presented and finally expressed as two coupled nonlinear equations with the help of the Lorentz reciprocity theorem. Numerical results demonstrate there exists plasmonic bistability of the propagation modes for a given intensity. This kind of bistability corresponds to the totally different energy distributions in the system, which can be used to develop the applications in the optical switches and optical detectors. (C) 2014 AIP Publishing LLC.