An efficient directional coupling from dielectric waveguide to hybrid long-range plasmonic waveguide on a silicon platform

The silicon-based three-dimensional hybrid long-range plasmonic waveguide not only supports long-range propagation distance (similar to mm) but also has an ultra-small modal area (similar to 10(-2) mu m(2)) at 1.55 mu m. Here, we propose a directional coupler for effective coupling from a dielectric slab-waveguide to the hybrid plasmonic waveguide on a silicon platform. Our simulation results show that the coupler is able to excite hybrid long-range plasmonic mode with short coupling length, low insertion loss, and high extinction ratio. With the arm separation of 0.3 mu m, the coupling length can be made 5.2 % of the propagation length of the hybrid plasmonic waveguide, while the insertion loss and extinction ratio are -0.12 and 22.4 dB, respectively. This coupler offers the potential applications in signal routing between the hybrid long-range plasmonic waveguide and dielectric waveguide in the photonic integrated circuits.