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I. INTRODUCTION
Fig. 1. Real part of the effective refractive index of an MIM waveguide as a
function of width of the insulator at free space wavelength of 1550 nm. Inset:
SURFACE plasmon polariton (SPP) [1] is an electro-
A magnetic excitation at the interface of a noble metal
and a dielectric, which can be utilized to manipulate light at
schematic picture of an MIM waveguide, where the insulator (white) is em-
bedded between two metal sheets (gray). In this letter, the insulator is assumed
to be air and the metal silver.
a subwavelength scale. As present-day advanced processing
techniques allow for the fabrication of subwavelength pho- II. DESIGN AND NUMERICAL RESULTS
tonic devices, the utilization of SPPs opens up a multitude
of possibilities for the next generation of photonic integrated
circuits. By now, a fairly large family of SPP subwavelength The dispersion relation of an MIM (the schematic of which
optical devices, such as mirrors [2], waveguides [3], directional is shown as an inset of Fig. 1) is governed by the following
couplers, and Mach–Zehnder interferometers [4] as well as dispersion equation:
modulators [5] have been proposed in the literature.
Planar SPP waveguides are mainly classified into (1)
two categories, insulator-metal-insulator (IMI)-type and
metal-insulator-metal (MIM)-type. Although IMI structures where and are the dielectric constants of the insulator and
have less loss, and thus longer propagation length, it has been the metal, respectively. is the width of the inner insulator.
shown that these structures suffer greatly from their poor and are the transverse propagation constants in the insulator
ability of confining light into subwavelength geometries [6]. and the metal, respectively, which are related to the effective
MIM-type waveguides have been shown to be the most efficient index of refraction as
for subwavelength manipulation of light with an acceptable
propagation length [6]. IMI-type Bragg gratings have recently
(2)
been reported in the literature [7], but in this letter, we propose
an MIM-type Bragg grating.
where is the propagation constant in vacuum.
It is straightforward to see from (1) that the characteristics
Manuscript received August 2, 2006; revised October 29, 2006. This work of light propagating through an MIM waveguide, e.g., effective
was supported by the National Basic Research Program (2004CB719800)
and by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (60688401 and
index, are controlled by the permittivity of the metal layers and
60677047). The work of E. Forsberg was supported by the Swedish Strategic the insulator as well as the width of the insulator; i.e., it is pos-
Research Foundation and by the Swedish Governmental Agency for Innovation sible to control the light propagation by altering at least one of
Systems. these parameters. In this letter, we propose and analyze an SPP
The authors are with the Centre for Optical and Electromagnetic Re-
search, Zhejiang University; Joint Research Center of Photonics of the waveguide Bragg grating formed by periodically varying the
Royal Institute of Technology (Sweden) and Zhejiang University, Zhejiang width of the insulator layer in the MIM waveguide. A similar
University, Hangzhou 310058, China (e-mail: zhanghua@coer.zju.edu.cn; grating can also be achieved by periodically changing the per-
erikf@zju.edu.cn; sailing@zju.edu.cn).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this letter are available online
mittivity of the metal layers as was recently proposed by Wang
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. et al. [8]. However, as will be shown below, our approach is su-
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LPT.2006.889036 perior in achievable performance as well as feasibility.
1041-1135/$25.00 © 2007 IEEE
92 IEEE PHOTONICS TECHNOLOGY LETTERS, VOL. 19, NO. 2, JANUARY 15, 2007
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