Hybrid spherical cap plasmonic waveguide for tight mode confinement and long propagation length

The special abilities of plasmonic waveguide including tight field confinement and beyond diffraction limit within nano-scale structure have been exploited in many different fields. In order to overcome the trade-off between tight mode confinement and long propagation length, many kinds of nano-scale structures have been proposed in recent years. In this paper, a novel hybrid plasmonic waveguide consisting of the layer of metal Ag, a spherical cap with low-index dielectric layer placed above the metal Ag and a high-index dielectric layer placed above the spherical cap is proposed and analyzed theoretically. The relations between the characteristics of the bound modes, such as mode confinement, propagation lengths, and parameters of the spherical cap, the curvature and width, are numerically investigated in detail. The simulation results show that the nano-scale confinement can be realized. The simulation result shows that the performance of the proposed spherical cap hybrid plasmonic waveguide is better than the rectangle or cylindrical hybrid plasmonic waveguide. Such hybrid plasmonic waveguide has a tight mode confinement and long propagation length. This novel structure provides a promising application for high-integration density photonic components.