Dielectric waveguide with deep subwavelength mode confinement based on coupled nanowires

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Dielectric waveguide with deep subwavelength mode confinement based on coupled semiconductor nanowires is proposed.Through the coupling between two adjacent nanowires with high refractive indexes, light can be efficiently confined in the nano-gap between the nanowires with a low refractive index. Numerical simulations indicate that the effective mode area of such a waveguide can be as small as Λ20/200, which is one order of magnitude smaller than that of a single nanowire, and such a mode confinement is comparable to that of hybrid plasmonic waveguide. It is also shown that from the view of real applications, possible existing low refractive index oxidization layers of nanowires, low refractive index substrate and small deviation of nanowire dimensions do not have significant influence on the property of the waveguide. As the propagation length is theoretically infinite for dielectric waveguides, such a coupled nanowire waveguide with deep subwavelength mode confinement may have important applications in future integrated photonic circuits.