Abstract
Dielectric loaded gratings (DLGs) comprised of polymer gratings lying on a thin
gold film are used to couple light at telecommunication frequencies in and out of
plasmonic waveguides featuring sub-micron cross-sections. The grating couplers are found
to be efficient and easy to implement to perform direct fiber-to-fiber telecommunication
characterizations of dielectric loaded surface plasmon polariton waveguide (DLSPPW)
components. By analyzing the dispersion of the plasmonic Bloch modes supported by DLGs
as a function of the period and the filling factor of the gratings, efficient couplers
comprised of gratings with a filling factor around 0.5 are designed and fabricated by a
simple one-step electron beam lithography process. Typical losses in the range of
-10 dB per coupler are obtained for gratings designed to operate at normal and
30°-tilted incidence. The performance of the couplers for normal incidence can
be further improved by adding a back-reflecting Bragg mirror. We demonstrate the
transmission of a 10 Gbits/s signal along a 75 μm-long DLSPPW by using DLG
couplers for light injection and extraction. A power penalty below below 0.4 dB on the
bit-error-rate has been measured over the entire C-band demonstrating the suitability of
DLSPPWs for Wavelength-Division-Multiplexed high bit rate traffic and the efficiency of
DLG couplers for fiber-to-fiber characterizations of stand alone DLSPPW
components.
© 2012 IEEE
PDF Article
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