Low Loss Hybrid Plasmonic Waveguide with Variable Nonlinearity and Ultralow Dispersion

In this paper, a hybrid plasmonic waveguide (HPW) that has a low optical loss with variable nonlinearity (γ) and ultralow dispersion (D) has been proposed. We analyzed and compared four different light confinement regions in the proposed HPW structure, namely air, SiO2, Si3N4, and Al2O3 based on Si3N4 and SiO2 platforms. The optimized HPW gives the largest propagation length (Lp) of 6.5 mm, which is 60% longer than that of the SiO2 platform, with a low propagation loss (Lm) of 0.8 dB/mm, as well as a high figure of merit (FoM) of 419,850 (> 105) with the Si3N4 platform at 1550 nm wavelengths. Moreover, the HPW shows better results for nonlinear coefficient and dispersion with the Si3N4 platform which have been obtained as 4.49 × 106 /(kmW) and 6.1 × 10–5 ps2/m. The simulation also shows that the proposed HPW has excellent fabrication tolerance. This device may serve as a fundamental building block of photonic integrated circuits (PICs) for wide applications in LiDAR, nanofocusing, nanolasing, sensing, and nonlinear optics.