Extension of an FFT-Based Beam Propagation Method to Plasmonic and Dielectric Waveguide Discontinuities and Junctions

Abstract

We adapted a fast Fourier transform-based Beam Propagation Method (FFT-BPM) to investigate waveguide discontinuities in plasmonic waveguides. The adaptation of the FFT-BPM to treat transverse magnetic (TM) fields requires the circumvention of two major difficulties: the mixed derivatives of the magnetic field and waveguide refractive index profile in the TM wave equation and the step-like index change at the transverse metal-dielectric boundary of the plasmonic guide and the transverse boundaries of the dielectric waveguide as well. An equivalent-index method is adopted to transform TM fields to transverse electric (TE) ones, thus enabling the benefit of the full power and simplicity of the FFT-BPM. Moreover, an appropriate smoothing function is used to approximate the step-like refractive index profile in the transverse direction. At the junction plane, we used an accurate combined spatial-spectral reflection operator to calculate the reflected field. To validate our proposed scheme, we investigated the modal propagation in a silicon waveguide terminated by air (like a laser facet in two cases: with and without a coating layer). Then we considered a subwavelength plasmonic waveguide (metal-insulator-metal MIM) butt-coupled with a dielectric waveguide, where the power transmission efficiency has been calculated and compared with other numerical methods. The comparison reveals good agreement.

Keywords

• plasmonics
• photonics
• bi-directional bpm
• optical propagation
• tm fields
• fft-bpm
• plasmonic waveguide
• butt-coupler
• sensors
• reflection formalism