Experimental Demonstration of Plasmon Propagation, Coupling, and Splitting in Silver Nanowire at 1550-nm Wavelength

We experimentally demonstrate silver-nanowire-based plasmonic devices including the nanowaveguide, the nanocoupler, and the nanosplitter at optical communication wavelength of 1550 nm. The plasmon propagation loss in a 300-nm diameter silver nanowire is measured to be 0.3 dB/μm and the effective propagation length is 14.5 μm. This loss is comparatively lower than that at 980 nm. Two types of plasmonic functional devices based on the coupling between two silver nanowires, nanocouplers, and nanosplitters, are realized. For the nanocoupler, the experimental results show that the plasmonic modes can be efficiently coupled between two closely positioned nanowires. While for the nanosplitter, the plasmonic mode is split with a power ratio of 2.6:1. These demonstrations experimentally prove the feasibility of extending the operating wavelength of silver-nanowire-based plasmonic devices to current optical communication wavelength with a lower loss, which are thus important steps for potentially utilizing low-loss nanowire-based plasmonic components for photonic integrated circuits.