High-Efficient Ultra-Short Vertical Long-Range Plasmonic Coupler

Ultra-short vertical plasmonic couplers were devised for the efficient excitation of long-range surface-polariton-plasmon mode, in the visible regime, between a polymeric waveguide and a plasmonic waveguide in two different configurations. Numerical simulations suggest the realization of coupling efficiencies as high as 90% and insertion losses as low as -5.5 dB, with a coupling length of few micrometers. Thus the proposed design clearly proves that is possible to optimize contemporaneously the coupling efficiency and the coupling length. Therefore the compactness and the lower fabrication requirements make the proposed device very promising in a variety of applications