Modal Characteristics of Plasmonic Multimode Interference Couplers with Stepped Structure

Abstract

A novel architecture to reduce dramatically the coupling length of multimode interference-based couplers (MMICs) is proposed by replacing conventionally designed MMICs by cascaded two-section plasmonic stepped MMICs (PS-MMIC). For the 60% cross power splitting ratio in a stepped-width MMIC, the coupling length of device results in around 42% length reduction. Furthermore, the power splitting ratio and coupling length of plasmonic MMIC just vary around 1~2% along the variation of refractive index. On the contrast, those factors for the variation of MMIC's width strongly vary around 30~40%.