Guided Surface Plasmon Propagation Implementing Nanojet Effect for Reduced Losses

The integration of nanophotonic components has a major challenge: the propagating signal suffers restrictive limiting losses. Even in the current state-of-the-art metal waveguides, high bandwidth and high processing speed signal for computational requirements is not reached yet. Interestingly, losses for highly confined electromagnetic field of surface plasmons in metals seem to be inevitable.

We are addressing this issue by exploiting the propagation of surface plasmons nanojets on nanostructured thin films in order to reduce propagation losses while retaining field confinement. By including an array of metal-coated nanojet structures on the metal surface we promote the surface plasmons propagation and impose specific propagation channels for the surface waves along the chains of nanojet structures. A nanojet is a nano-optic beam highly focused; the sub-wavelength-waist beam emerges on the shadow side of the nanostructure, characterized by high intensity and low divergence.