Flexible nanofiber-coupled hybrid plasmonic Bragg grating

We report a hybrid plasmonic Bragg grating composed of a nanofiber coupled with orthogonally oriented metal strips. Numerical simulations are performed to study the transmission and reflection spectra of the grating. It shows that the TM polarization has much stronger Bragg reflection due to the excitation of hybrid plasmonic modes. The dependence of reflection peaks on several key device parameters is analyzed. Light propagation simulation further reveals that both fundamental and first-order TM modes are excited upon Bragg reflection, leading to two separate peaks in the spectrum. We implement the prototype device by attaching a nanofiber onto the surface of an array of sub-micrometer-wide metal strips. The main reflection peak is measured to have a 3-dB bandwidth of 15 nm and out-of-band rejection of more than 30 dB. The effects of nanofiber radius, alignment angle and coupling length on the device performance are also experimentally investigated.