Infrared hollow waveguides utilizing a dielectric multilayer are examined by use of a photonic bandgap theory. It is shown that, in the waveguide consisting of quarter-wave film stack, the act of covering the dielectric films with a metal layer is effective in the reduction of the number of film layers. To verify the effect of this design, we fabricated a prototype waveguide with three dielectric layers of SiO_(2)/Ta_(2)O_(5)/SiO_(2) and a silver layer by using a liquid-phase coating technique. From the loss spectrum of the fabricated waveguide, it is confirmed that, as designed, the wavegnide shows wideband low-loss property at the wavelength of Nd:YAG laser light 1.06 μm.
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