Asymmetric hybrid plasmonic waveguides with centimeter-scale propagation length under subwavelength confinement for photonic components.
An asymmetric hybrid plasmonic metal-wire waveguide is proposed by combining the advantages of symmetric and hybrid plasmonic modes. The idea of asymmetric structure eliminates the adverse effect of a substrate and enhances the optical performance of the waveguide. The guiding properties of the proposed waveguide are intensively investigated using the finite elements method. The results exhibit a quite long propagation length of 2.69 cm with subwavelength confinement. More importantly, an extremely large figure of merit of 139037 is achieved. Furthermore, the proposed waveguides can be used as directional couplers. They can achieve a coupling length of only 1.01 μm at S = 0.1 μm with negligible loss. A strong dependence of coupling length on the operating wavelength makes the proposed waveguide promising for realizing wavelength-selective components at telecommunication wavelengths.
State Key Laboratory of Information Photonics and Optical Communications, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, P.O. Box 66, Beijing 100876, China.
Wei
W
Wei
State Key Laboratory of Information Photonics and Optical Communications, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, P.O. Box 66, Beijing 100876, China.
Xia
X
Zhang
State Key Laboratory of Information Photonics and Optical Communications, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, P.O. Box 66, Beijing 100876, China.
Xiaomin
X
Ren
Integrated photonics; Optical interconnections; Plasmonic waveguides; Surface plasmons