title: Strongly Confined Spoof Surface Plasmon Polaritons Waveguiding Enabled by Planar Staggered Plasmonic Waveguides.
abstract: We demonstrate a novel route to achieving highly efficient and strongly confined spoof surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) waveguides at subwavelength scale enabled by planar staggered plasmonic waveguides (PSPWs). The structure of these new waveguides consists of an ultrathin metallic strip with periodic subwavelength staggered double groove arrays supported by a flexible dielectric substrate, leading to unique staggered EM coupling and waveguiding phenomenon. The spoof SPP propagation properties, including dispersion relations and near field distributions, are numerically investigated. Furthermore, broadband coplanar waveguide (CPW) to planar staggered plasmonic waveguide (PSPW) transitions are designed to achieve smooth momentum matching and highly efficient spoof SPP mode conversion. By applying these transitions, a CPW-PSPW-CPW structure is designed, fabricated and measured to verify the PSPW's propagation performance at microwave frequencies. The investigation results show the proposed PSPWs have excellent performance of deep subwavelength spoof SPPs confinement, long propagation length and low bend loss, as well as great design flexibility to engineer the propagation properties by adjusting their geometry dimensions and material parameters. Our work opens up a new avenue for development of various advanced planar integrated plasmonic devices and circuits in microwave and terahertz regimes.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Electromagnetics and Acoustics, and Department of Electronic Science, Xiamen University, Xiamen 361005, China.|Shenzhen Research Institute of Xiamen University, Shenzhen 518057, China.
authors.forename: Longfang
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Ye
authors.affiliation: Institute of Electromagnetics and Acoustics, and Department of Electronic Science, Xiamen University, Xiamen 361005, China.
authors.forename: Yifan
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Xiao
authors.affiliation: Institute of Electromagnetics and Acoustics, and Department of Electronic Science, Xiamen University, Xiamen 361005, China.
authors.forename: Yanhui
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: Institute of Electromagnetics and Acoustics, and Department of Electronic Science, Xiamen University, Xiamen 361005, China.
authors.forename: Liang
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.affiliation: Institute of Electromagnetics and Acoustics, and Department of Electronic Science, Xiamen University, Xiamen 361005, China.
authors.forename: Guoxiong
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Cai
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Duke University, Durham 27708, USA.
authors.forename: Qing Huo
authors.initials: QH
authors.lastname: Liu