Efficient coupling of light from dielectric to HIMI plasmonic waveguide

This is the first report on the investigation of a hybrid plasmonic tapered coupler injecting light efficiently from conventional dielectric waveguide to a hybrid insulator-metal-insulator (HIMI) plasmonic waveguide. The proposed structure gives high transmission efficiency and suppresses the reflection losses significantly. With this tapered coupling mechanism, maximum transmittance and return loss of 98% and 26 dB have been observed, respectively. The coupler also offers very good propagation length (274 mu m) along with minimal mode propagation losses (0.016 dB/mu m). Apart from that, it offers decent confinement of light in low dielectric regions up to 32%. The proposed structure is designed in an ultra-short tapered length of 1.0 mu m, and the entire structure occupies a footprint area of 1.4 x 2.4 mu m(2). Proposed hybrid waveguide coupler could be useful for several chip scale applications.