Efficient butt-coupling of surface plasmons on a silver-air interface

Abstract

Butt-coupling of light into a surface plasmon is a simple and compact coupling method with a range of potential uses in photonic circuitry. Although butt-coupling has been successfully implemented in many coupling configurations, the coupling effectiveness is not fully understood. Here, we present a semi-analytical study which models the coupling efficiency of an incident beam into a surface plasmon on silver in the presence of loss using an projection method in one dimension. We find that the coupling efficiencies for silver between the wavelengths of 0.38 − 1.6 µm reach 77 − 88% with optimum incident beam parameters.