Manipulating the effective index of the hybrid plasmonic waveguide based on subwavelength grating

摘要

In this paper, we propose and numerically study a subwavelength grating based hybrid plasmonic waveguide. The metal layer on top of the waveguide enables unique features compared with conventional silicon based waveguide. Since the field distribution in this structure is different, traditional homogeneous medium approximation is not applicative. Therefore, we develop a new effective index calculation method. This method is suitable for metal-existing waveguide as well as structures with multiple medium. Effective index of this waveguide depends on grating period, duty ratio and width, respectively. By modifying duty ratio and period of the waveguide, the relationship between effective index and waveguide width can be concave function or convex function and the slope can be similar to TM mode of silicon based waveguide, which opens up possibilities for SPPs based applications.