Cladding Effect on Hybrid Plasmonic Nanowire Cavity at Telecommunication Wavelengths

In this paper, we investigate the effect of cladding layers on a hybrid plasmonic nanowire cavity. A decent confinement factor and moderate modal loss can be achieved for lasing. Within a certain index range of the cladding layer, the fundamental hybrid plasmonic mode is well confined inside the narrow gain region and becomes the most promising lasing mode. Our results also indicate that the mirror loss can be reduced if the refractive index of the cladding layer is properly chosen. An estimated cold-cavity quality factor of 87, corresponding to a threshold gain of about 1072 cm^-1, is achievable at a cavity length of 10.13 μm for the lasing mode.