Degenerate four-wave mixing in silicon hybrid plasmonic waveguides

Silicon-based plasmonic waveguides show high confinement well beyond the diffraction limit. Various devices have been demonstrated to outperform their dielectric counterparts at micrometer scales, such as linear modulators, capable of generating high field confinement and improving device efficiency by increasing access to nonlinear processes, limited by ohmic losses. By using hybridized plasmonic waveguide architectures and nonlinear materials, silicon-based plasmonic waveguides can generate strong nonlinear effects over just a few wavelengths. We have theoretically investigated the nonlinear optical performance of two hybrid plasmonic waveguides (HPWG) with three different nonlinear materials. Based on this analysis, the hybrid gap plasmon waveguide (HGPW), combined with the DDMEBT nonlinear polymer, shows a four-wave mixing (FWM) conversion efficiency of -16.4  dB over a 1 μm propagation length, demonstrating that plasmonic waveguides can be competitive with standard silicon photonics structures over distances three orders of magnitude shorter.