A Unit-Cell Discontinuous Galerkin Scheme for Analyzing Plasmonic Photomixers

A discontinuous Galerkin (DG) framework is developed for efficient analysis of plasmonic photomixers. The proposed framework solves coupled systems of Poisson/diffusion-drift and time-domain Maxwell/diffusion-drift equations to characterize the non-equilibrium steady state and the transient response, respectively. A unit-cell based modeling is adopted to increase the framework's efficiency. Periodic boundary conditions for carrier densities and electromagnetic fields are enforced on the surfaces of the unit cell. Since the potential is not periodic, a "potential-drop" boundary condition is applied across the opposing surfaces the unit cell. Numerical experiments show that this approach significantly increases the efficiency of the DG framework without sacrificing from accuracy.