Long range hybrid tube-wedge plasmonic waveguide with extreme light confinement and good fabrication error tolerance

We studied a novel long range hybrid tube-wedge plasmonic (LRHTWP) waveguide consisting of a high index dielectric nanotube placed above a triangular metal wedge substrate. Using comprehensive numerical simulations on guiding properties of the designed waveguide, it is found that extreme light confinement and low propagation loss are obtained due to strong coupling between dielectric nanotube mode and wedge plasmon polariton. Comparing with previous studied hybrid plasmonic waveguides, the LRHTWP waveguide has longer propagation length and tighter mode confinement. In addition, the LRHTWP waveguide is quite tolerant to practical fabrication errors such as variation of the wedge tip angle and the horizontal misalignment between the nanotube and the metal wedge. The proposed LRHTWP waveguide could have many application potentials for various high performance nanophotonic components.