Tunable coupling of a hybrid plasmonic waveguide consisting of two identical dielectric cylinders and a silver film☆☆Project supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 11647021) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities of China (Grant No. ZY1531).

Abstract

The propagation length of surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) is intrinsically limited by the metallic ohmic loss that is enhanced by the strongly confined electromagnetic field. In this paper, we propose a new class of hybrid plasmonic waveguides (HPWs) that can support long-range SPP propagation while keeping subwavelength optical field confinement. It is shown that the coupling between the waveguides can be well tuned by simply varying the structural parameters. Compared with conventional HPWs, a larger propagation length as well as a better optical field confinement can be simultaneously realized. The proposed structure with better optical performance can be useful for future photonic device design and optical integration research.