Modified field confinement and enhanced optical forces in hybrid dielectric wedge tip-loaded plasmonic waveguide

Abstract

We proposed and theoretically investigated a hybrid plasmonics waveguide consisting of a tiptilted quadrate nanowire, which was embedded in a low-permittivity dielectric and placed on a metal substrate with a small gap distance. Due to the corner effect, the hybrid mode with extremely local field enhancement has the long propagation length and strong coupling strength between the dielectric nanowire and metal. By employing the simulations with different geometric parameters, the proposed waveguide can obtain better performances than the previous hybrid plasmonics waveguide, particularly in the subwavelength confinement (as small as λ2/1600), long-range propagation (millimeter range), and optical trapping forces (2.12 pN/W). The use of a naturally dielectric wedge tip of quadrate nanowire that can be chemically synthesized provides an efficient approach to circumvent the fabrication difficulty of shape wedge tips. The present structure provides an excellent platform for nanophotonic waveguides, nanolasers, nanoscale optical tweezers, and biosensing.