A hybrid long-range surface plasmon waveguide comprising a narrow metal stripe surrounded by the low-index dielectric regions

A novel hybrid long-range surface plasmon waveguide structure comprising a narrow metal stripe, two relative low-index dielectric regions and dielectric ridges is proposed and analyzed. With the dielectric ridges and the two relative low-index dielectric regions symmetrically distributed on both sides of the narrow metal stripe, a symmetric hybrid long range mode with low electromagnetic transmission loss and subwavelength scale confinement is achieved. By optimizing the parameters, the propagation length of the proposed waveguide is increased to over two times to that of the conventional symmetric dielectric loaded surface plasmon waveguide, but the mode size only increases about 20%. For this benefit, the hybrid long-range surface plasmons waveguide is a good candidate for realizing high density photonic integration circuits.