Abstract
We demonstrate the design, fabrication, and experimental characterization of a long range surface plasmon polariton waveguide that is compatible with complementary metal-oxide semiconductor backend technology. The structure consists of a thin aluminum strip embedded in amorphous silicon. This configuration offers a symmetric environment in which surface plasmon polariton modes undergo minimal loss. Furthermore, the plasmonic mode profile matches the modes of the dielectric (amorphous silicon) waveguide, thus allowing efficient coupling between silicon photonics and plasmonic platforms. The propagation length of the plasmonic waveguide was measured to be about 27 μm at the telecom wavelength around 1550 nm, in good agreement with numerical simulations. As such, the waveguide features both tight mode confinement and decent propagation length. On top of its photonic properties, placing a metal within the structure may also allow for additional functionalities such as photo-detection, thermo-optic tuning, and electro-optic control to be implemented.
Highlights
Over the last couple of decades, plasmonic devices attract growing attention due to their unique features such as tight light confinement, nanoscale light manipulation, and enhanced light-matter interactions
By preforming a linear fit, we can extract the propagation loss, which was found to be 0.161 ± 0.015, corresponding to a propagation length of 27.01 ± 2.8 μm. This result is in good agreement with the numerical simulations, predicting a loss of 0.126 for the fundamental LR mode, (Fig. 4)
We have experimentally demonstrated for the first time a Long Range Surface Plasmon Polariton (LR-SPP) waveguide with aluminum embedded in a-silicon
Summary
Over the last couple of decades, plasmonic devices attract growing attention due to their unique features such as tight light confinement, nanoscale light manipulation, and enhanced light-matter interactions. In the context of plasmonic waveguides, the presence of a metal within the structure may facilitate the possibility of co-propagation of overlapping electric and photonic signals and is of great interest. These unique characteristics can be utilized to allow diverse functionalities. These include, for example, metallic strip,[13,14,15] gap,[16,17] nanowires,[18,19] V-groove,[20,21,22,23,24] long range surface plasmon polariton (LR-SPP) waveguides,[24,25] and dielectric loaded long range surface plasmon polariton (DL-LRSPP) waveguides.[26,27,28,29] Many of these waveguides offer longer propagation length of the signal at the expense of weaker spatial confinement and can be utilized for myriad applications
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