Design of Highly Efficient Hybrid Si-Au Taper for Dielectric Strip Waveguide to Plasmonic Slot Waveguide Mode Converter

Abstract: In this paper, we design a dielectric-to-plasmonic slot waveguide mode converter based on the hybrid silicon-gold taper. The effects of mode matching, the effective index matching, and the metallic absorption loss on the conversion efficiency are studied. Consequently, a metallic taper-funnel coupler with an overall length of 1.7um is designed to achieve a very high conversion efficiency of 93.3% at 1550 nm. The configuration limitations for not allowing this mode converter to achieve a 100% conversion efficiency are also investigated. Such a high-efficiency converter can provide practical routes to realize ultracompact integrated circuits.