Long-range hybrid wedge plasmonic waveguide.

Abstract

We design a novel long-range hybrid wedge plasmonic (LRHWP) waveguide composed of two identical dielectric nanowires symmetrically placed on two opposed wedges of a diamond shaped metal wire. With strong coupling between the dielectric nanowire mode and long-range surface plasmon polariton (SPP) mode, both deep subwavelength mode confinement and low propagation loss are achieved. On one hand, when compared to the previous long-range hybrid SPP waveguide, LRHWP waveguide can achieve smaller mode size with similar propagation length; on the other hand, when compared to the previous hybrid wedge SPP waveguide, LRHWP waveguide can provide an order of magnitude longer propagation length with similar level of mode confinement. The designed LRHWP waveguide also features an overall advantage of one-order improvement of Figure of Merit. We further evaluate in detail the impacts of possible practical fabrication imperfections on the mode properties. The obtained results of mode properties show that the proposed LRHWP waveguide with an optimized wedge tip angle of 140 degree is fairly tolerant to practical fabrication errors in geometry parameters such as misalignment in the horizontal direction, asymmetry in the vertical direction, variation of wedge tip angle, tilt or rotation of metal wire, and variation of wedge tip curvature radius.