Emergence of Anderson localization in plasmonic waveguides

The propagation of surface plasmon polaritons in dielectric loaded waveguides with randomly placed scatterers is studied using both numerical simulations and a simplified transfer matrix framework. Despite the importance of losses in this system, we find fingerprints of the localized behavior of one-dimensional disordered systems. Furthermore, losses amplify the impact of the necklace states on the transport properties for systems not much larger than the localization length. The system presented here also offers the possibility to use localization effects for engineering purposes by means of deliberately introduced disorder.