Multidirectional surface-wave splitters

We propose a multidirectional surface-wave splitter excited by a cylindrical wire. Such a splitter could function as a plasmonic wavelength-division multiplexer, since electromagnetic waves at the designed frequencies will be confined and guided along different multiple grating structures that are placed around the cylindrical wire. The experimental verification of the proposed splitter has been implemented in the microwave frequencies. The measurement results have excellent agreements to the full-wave simulations to show the good performance of the splitter. We also propose and simulate a multidirectional surface-wave splitter in the terahertz frequency to validate the concept. (C) 2011 American Institute of Physics. [doi: 10.1063/1.3595281]