Extending the Propagation Distance of a Silver Nanowire Plasmonic Waveguide with a Dielectric Multilayer Substrate

Abstract

Chemical synthesized silver nanowires have been proved to be the efficient architecture for Plasmonic waveguides, but the high propagation loss prevents their widely applications. Here, we demonstrate that the propagation distance of the plasmons along the Ag NW can be extended if the Ag NW was placed on a dielectric multilayer substrate containing a photonic band gap, but not placed on a commonly used glass substrate. The propagation distance at 630 nm wavelength can reach 16 um even that the Ag NW is as thin as 90 nm in diameter. Experimental and simulation results further show that the polarization of this propagating plasmon mode was nearly parallel to the surface of the dielectric multilayer, so it was excited by a transverse-electric polarized Bloch surface wave propagating along a polymer nanowire with diameter at only about 170 nm on the same dielectric multilayer. Numerical simulations were also carried out and consistent with the experiment results. Our work provides a platform to extend the propagation distance of plasmonic waveguide and also for the integration between photonic and plasmonic waveguides on the nanometre scale.