English

A Fundamental Limit on Propagation Loss of Waveguides with Subwavelength Mode Size

Optics 2014-11-18 v1

Abstract

A fundamental trade-off relation between the cross sectional confinement and propagation length of an arbitrary mode of a general waveguide is presented. This limit is a generalization of the well-known diffraction limit for guided modes. The results provide a lower bound on propagation loss of plasmonic waveguides which are attractive for their deep subwavelength mode dimensions. We also introduce a material loss merit factor that sets a criterion for comparing different plasmonic materials for achieving the best trade-off between confinement and loss.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1411.4402,
  title  = {A Fundamental Limit on Propagation Loss of Waveguides with Subwavelength Mode Size},
  author = {Amir Arbabi and Ehsan Arbabi and Safieddin Safavi-Naeini},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1411.4402},
  year   = {2014}
}