Plasmonic Waveguides

Although photonics offers an attractive solution to the speed limitation of electronics, reducing the size of bulky photonic components is one of the major issues towards the implementation of photonic integrated circuits. Plasmonic circuits, with tightly confine electromagnetic waves at the metal-dielectric interface, can be a potential solution to this problem. Despite an excessive amount of papers published in the field, there exists an inconsistency in terms of the measure of plasmonic modal properties, especially their mode size. In this research work, several representative plasmonic structures are studied and their modal characteristics are cross-compared. Confinement has been calculated using several definitions in order to measure their figure of merits consistently. For both classical and quantum applications exploiting the deep localization of SPPs, it is interesting to research SPP waveguides with higher degree of subwavelength confinement. In addition, it is also highly desirable to find new, simpler and more robust SPP waveguides for longer wavelengths, in which SPPs get largely localized.