Cylindrical hybrid plasmonic waveguide for subwavelength confinement of light

A novel cylindrical hybrid plasmonic waveguide is proposed to achieve subwavelength confinement of light. With a metal core surrounded by a silica layer and a silicon layer, the proposed cylindrical hybrid plasmonic waveguide can achieve a ring-structure mode profile at the operating wavelength (1550 nm). Most mode power locates in the silica layer with a nanoscale thickness (e. g., 50, 20, or even 5 nm), which is due to the effects of both a strong discontinuity of the normal component of the electric field at the silicon-silica interface and the exited surface plasmon wave at the silica-metal interface. Cylindrical hybrid plasmonic waveguides with different structure parameters are investigated and a relatively long propagation distance of tens of micrometers (or even hundreds of micrometers) is observed. (C) 2010 Optical Society of America