Integrated photonics in the future: Silicon, plasmonics or something else?

In anticipation of a possible future breakthrough in developing metamaterials with at least a factor of 10 lower losses we analyze in this paper different resonant and nonresonant structures and the achievable performance. One example is waveguides made from arrays of near resonantly operated near-field coupled metal nanoparticles in the shape of e.g. spheres, which have attracted some attention. Nanoarray waveguides, based on silver nanoparticles are, however, very lossy, see e.g.