Design of a Slit-Groove Coupler for Unidirectional Excitation of the Guided Surface Plasmon Polaritons Through a Plasmonic Slot Waveguide

In this paper, a plasmonic-photonic nanostructure has been introduced for efficient unidirectional coupling of free-space radiation to surface plasmon polariton (SPP) waves under normal illumination on a subwavelength slit. The structure consists of a conventional metallic slit-groove nanostructure integrated with a plasmonic waveguide to support SPP waves along the desired direction with a remarkable lateral confinement. The unidirectional coupling is achieved by using an integrated plasmonic distributed reflector designed under Bragg condition. This reflector basically distributes part of the light coupled through the slit into the SPP modes of the waveguide. Numerical simulations show that up to 26 % of the normally incident light couples to the transversely localized field of the surface plasmon. In addition, the ratio of mode current density of the surface plasmon, launched in the desired direction, to that in the opposite direction can reach about 23 times. This structure shows a 2.5-fold improvement in coupling efficiency relative to a standard slit-groove structure. Also, the transmission distance for the new nanostructure is shown to be more than 8 times greater than that of the standard nanostructure.