Low loss hybrid plasmonic photonic crystal waveguide for optical communication applications

In this paper, a new design of hybrid plasmonic photonic crystal (PhC) waveguide is proposed and analyzed at operating wavelength of 1550 nm. The suggested design consists of hybrid cylindrical core with periodic grating as a cladding region. The effective index ( n eff ), propagation length ( L p ), and normalized mode effective area ( A eff ) of the supported modes are numerically investigated using full vectorial finite element method. The cladding geometry is tuned to obtain long propagation length with good field confinement. The reported plasmonic PhC with uniform grating achieves long propagation length and low propagation loss of 124 µm, and 0.035 dB/µm respectively. Further, the PhC with chirped cladding offers propagation length and low propagation loss of 162 µm, and 0.0268 dB/µm at λ = 1550 nm, respectively.