Plasmonic transmission lines: from micro to nano scale with lambda/4 impedance matching.

The downscaling of conventional RF transmission lines methodologies to subwavelength plasmonic circuits is discussed and demonstrated for a lambda/4 transformer impedance matching. The nano-size transformer, matching between 0.5mum and 50nm wide plasmonic transmission lines, enhances the coupling efficiency by more than 285% compared to the direct ("end fire") coupling - i.e. harvesting more than 86% of total incident power. The influence of the transverse resonances induced by the metal claddings of the input transmission line on the light harvesting is discussed as well.