Circular hybrid plasmonic waveguide with ultra-long propagation distance.
We propose a novel plasmonic waveguide structure, which is referred to as a circular hybrid plasmonic waveguide (HPW) and consists of a metal wire covered with low- and high-index dielectric layers. The circular HPW exhibits two distinctly different modes, namely, the strongly localized mode and the extremely low-loss mode. Our numerical calculation demonstrates that the strongly localized mode exhibits 10-4order scale in normalized mode area and can be performed even in tens of nanometer sizes of waveguide geometry. In the extremely low-loss mode, the HPW exhibits ultra-long propagation distance of more than 103μm that can be achieved by forming the dipole-like hybrid mode and properly adjusting the radius of the metal wire. It is also shown that, even with this long-range propagation, the mode area of the dipole-like hybrid mode can be maintained at subwavelength scale. The simultaneous achievement of a small mode area and ultra-long propagation distance contributes to the ultra-high propagation distance to mode size ratio of the waveguide. The HPW results are very helpful for plasmonic device applications in the fields of low-threshold nanolasers, ultrafast modulators, and optical switches.
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Ajou University, Suwon 443-749, South Korea.
Chang Yeong
CY
Jeong
Myunghwan
M
Kim
Sangin
S
Kim
D004867:Equipment Design; D019544:Equipment Failure Analysis; D005336:Fiber Optic Technology / Q000295:instrumentation*; D012031:Refractometry / Q000295:instrumentation*; D020349:Surface Plasmon Resonance / Q000295:instrumentation*