A marriage of convenience: Hybridization of surface plasmon and dielectric waveguide modes

Plasmonics has attracted a lot of interest in the past few years because of its unique features, especially for its ability to confine light in extremely small volumes. However, application of plasmonics is restricted by the large propagation loss associated with plasmonic waveguides. On the other hand, dielectric waveguides enjoy low loss, although the mode confinement is relatively weaker. Hybrid plasmonic waveguides (HPWGs), which combine these two guiding mechanisms, allow one to utilize the benefits of both technologies. Over the past few years there have been intense research activities around the world on this new guiding scheme. In this work the operating principle of HPWGs, various HPWG structures proposed by different research groups, and their potentail applications are reviewed.