Surface plasmon dielectric waveguides

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that surface plasmon polaritons can be guided by nanoscale dielectric waveguides, enabling significant miniaturization of optoelectronic devices.

Contribution

It introduces a method to guide surface plasmon polaritons with nanometer-scale dielectric waveguides, showing potential for device miniaturization.

Findings

Plasmons were successfully coupled to a curved dielectric stripe.

The waveguides had a width of 200 nm and thickness of 138 nm.

Device scale can be reduced by at least an order of magnitude.

Abstract

We demonstrate that surface plasmon polaritons can be guided by nanometer scale dielectric waveguides. In a test experiment plasmons were coupled to a curved 3 micrometer radius dielectric stripe, which was 200 nm wide and 138 nm thick using a parabolic surface coupler. This experiment demonstrates that using surface plasmon polaritons the scale of optoelectronic devices based on dielectric waveguides can be shrunk by at least an order of magnitude.