Bidirectional bending splitter of designer surface plasmons

We propose and experimentally verify a bidirectional bending splitter of designer surface plasmons which is composed of two metallic gratings of trapezoid grooves. A metal wire is used to excite the designer surface plasmons propagating along the gratings. A full-wave numerical method has been used to simulate the performance of the bending splitter. The experimental verifications in the microwave frequencies have excellent agreements to the simulations. It is demonstrated that the splitter can not only split the electromagnetic waves at different frequencies, but also guide the electromagnetic waves effectively for large-angle bending. (C) 2011 American Institute of Physics. [doi:10.1063/1.3639277]