Nonlocal effects in a hybrid plasmonic waveguide for nanoscale confinement.

The effect of nonlocal optical response is studied for a novel silicon hybrid plasmonic waveguide (HPW). Finite element method is used to implement the hydrodynamic model and the propagation mode is analyzed for a hybrid plasmonic waveguide of arbitrary cross section. The waveguide has an inverted metal nano-rib over a silicon-on-insulator (SOI) structure. An extremely small mode area of~10⁻⁶λ² is achieved together with several microns long propagation distance at the telecom wavelength of 1.55 μm. The figure of merit (FoM) is also improved in the same time, compared to the pervious hybrid plasmonic waveguide. We demonstrate the validity of our method by comparing our simulating results with some analytical results for a metal cylindrical waveguide and a metal slab waveguide in a wide wavelength range. For the HPW, we find that the nonlocal effects can give less loss and better confinement. In particular, we explore the influence of the radius of the rib's tip on the loss and the confinement. We show that the nonlocal effects give some new fundamental limitation on the confinement, leaving the mode area finite even for geometries with infinitely sharp tips.