Gap plasmon excitation in plasmonic waveguide using Si waveguide

Abstract

Plasmonic waveguides have attracted considerable attention for application in highly integrated optical circuits since they can confine light to areas smaller than the diffraction limit. In this context, in order to realize a highly integrated optical circuit, we fabricate and evaluate the optical characteristics of a poly(methyl methacrylate) junction positioned between Si and plasmonic waveguides. For the plasmonic waveguide, we employ a gap plasmonic waveguide in which the energy of the plasmonic wave can be confined in order to reduce the scattering loss at the junction. By experimental measurement, we determine the coupling efficiency between the Si and gap plasmonic waveguides and the propagation length at the gap plasmonic waveguide to be 52.4% and 11.1 µm, respectively. These values agree with those obtained by the three-dimensional finite-difference time-domain simulation. We believe that our findings can significantly contribute to the development of highly integrated optical circuits.