Characterization of surface plasmon-polariton waveguides

 Plasmonics waveguides have unique, attractive features such as 1) allowing co-propagation of optical and electrical signals and 2) tight confinement of the electromagnet mode.  A recently published work describes a new configuration of plasmonic waveguides that tries to overcome the device’s well-known obstacle of a limited propagation length, where the loss of light signal occurs due to light absorption in the metal.  Authors Uriel Levy and colleagues use a Nanonics Multiview 4000 in this paper [Optics Express, 2014] to characterize the properties of the waveguide and to measure the propagation loss of the waveguide modes.  They find comparable propagation loss in their devices, and they suggest significant improvements to the propagation losses with changes to the fabrication process of the device.

Published:  Optics Express, Sep 3 2014