Metal-coated silicon nanowire plasmonic waveguides

We report that a metal-coated silicon nanowire functions as a plasmonic waveguide. Measurements showed that plasmonic waveguide modes propagated efficiently through a chemically synthesized silicon nanowire with a diameter of 80nm coated with silver. The propagation lengths for transverse-magnetic and transverse-electric modes were estimated to be 8:05 and 6:61 m, respectively. Numerical simulations of the propagation length and mode profile of each plasmonic waveguide mode agreed with the experimental results. These plasmonic waveguides with highly smooth surfaces, fabricated through a bottom-up approach, represent a meaningful step toward the demonstration of an ultracompact subwavelength-scale plasmonic integrated circuit.