Discerning electromagnetically induced transparency from Autler-Townes splitting in plasmonic waveguide and coupled resonators system

Electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) and Autler-Townes splitting (ATS) are two phenomena that can affect the transmission of a probe field in the presence of a stronger field, both yielding transparency in the absorption profile. Being able to discriminate these two similar but distinct phenomena is of vital importance. Here we propose a scheme to describe the EIT and ATS phenomena in a plasmonic system. The proposed system consists of one radiative resonator and one subradiant resonator in metal-insulator-metal waveguide, and the transition is observed from the ATS model to the EIT model through three qualitative regions as the coupling strength decreases. In addition, we apply the method proposed by Anisimov to the induced transparency spectrum in our model, and numerically discerning EIT from ATS based on the Akaike's information criterion in a clear way. (C)2015 Optical Society of America