Mode Analysis of a Symmetric Hybrid Surface Plasmonic Waveguide for Photonic Integration

A 2-D symmetric hybrid surface plasmonic waveguide is proposed and numerical analysis is carried out to study its supported mode properties, including the field distribution of the mode, the effective index, propagation length, and normalized mode area of the fundamental modes. Results show that this type of hybrid waveguide can support a longer propagation length fundamental mode as well as three types of high loss modes when the working wavelength is 1550 nm. By tuning the geometrical parameters and choosing a proper fundamental mode in terms of its characteristics, it is shown that this hybrid surface plasmonic waveguide has potential applications in low loss and high density photonic integration, biosensors, nanolasers, and nonlinear photonics.