Nanoplasmonic couplers and modulators based on metal-insulator-

metal structures
Zhaolin Lu*, Ruoxi Yang, Rami A. Wahsheh, M. A. G. Abushagur
Microsystems Engineering, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY 14623, USA

ABSTRACT

We propose a “slot-to-slot” coupler to convert power between optical and metal-insulator-metal (MIM) plasmonic
modes. Coupling efficiency of larger than 60% is obtained from 2D FDTD simulation. Based on this prototype, a quasi-
MIM plasmonic junction is demonstrated using e-beam lithography onto an SOI substrate. The junction is formed by
depositing a thin layer of gold (~20 nm) on part of a dielectric slot. When probed by 1520-nm laser, coupling efficiency
of 36% is achieved for a 500-nm long quasi-MIM junction. Optical modulation is under investigation by pumping the
device using visible light to change the optical property of gold.
Keywords: Plasmonics, coupler, integration, optics

1. INTRODUCTION
Recent breakthroughs in plasmonics have witnessed the development of many nanoplasmonic devices that generate,
guide, and detect light [1-6], in an extraordinarily fast pace. But demonstration of on-chip plasmonic devices, especially
on how to integrate plasmonic devices with conventional dielectric optical circuits on the same chip, remains a huge
challenge, which limits the wide applications of plasmonic devices. In this sense, efficient and compact coupling scheme
between dielectric waveguides and plasmonic waveguides is an important issue within this fast-growing field.
Originally, a plasmonic waveguide was usually proposed with a single metal-insulator (MI) boundary, which is still
widely used. However, direct excitation of surface plasmon waves on a single MI boundary from a dielectric waveguide
or far-field radiation source is inefficient because of the mismatch of wave vectors and mode profiles. Therefore, prism
couplers [7,8] or grating couplers [9] are widely used to improve the coupling efficiency. Prism couplers are not suitable
for photonic integrated circuits because of its bulky size. The main drawbacks of grating couplers are (i) the separation
of the source and plasmonic devices on different chips, (ii) requiring good alignment between the source and the grating,
and (iii) narrow bandwidth.
Plasmonic devices with metal-insulator-metal (MIM) configuration have been extensively studied, and been
demonstrated in various forms recently [10-19]. For MIM structures, sub-wavelength confinement of the propagation
plasmonic mode and electric field enhancement are two major features. Recent numerical simulation predicts direct
light-coupling from a silicon waveguide into a 2D MIM waveguide [19], in which 70% power delivery has been
achieved when near infrared light is coupled from a 300-nm-wide dielectric waveguide into a silver-air-silver plasmonic
waveguide. Direct fabrication of the dielectric-to-plasmonic waveguide couplers is challenging, however. A plasmonic
coupler that directly converts optical radiation from freespace to surface waves has also been demonstrated recently [18].
The fabrication in [18] used focused ion beam, which introduces contamination of gallium to the system and requires
additional curing process. A direct coupler, which integrates MIM waveguides into optical waveguide [16], is formed by
enclosing a dielectric waveguide in metal cladding, where the dielectric core is shielded from external signals. This
platform hampers further applications for optical sensors and modulators. Herein, we propose a quasi-MIM
configuration that is practical for demonstration and integration to dielectric optical circuits.

*zhaolin.lu@rit.edu; phone 1 585 475-2106; fax 1 585 475-6879; http://people.rit.edu/zxleen

Integrated Optics: Devices, Materials, and Technologies XIV, edited by Jean-Emmanuel Broquin, Christoph M. Greiner,
Proc. of SPIE Vol. 7604, 760419 · © 2010 SPIE · CCC code: 0277-786X/10/$18 · doi: 10.1117/12.842084

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 2. DESIGN AND SIMULATION
Propagation light confined in subwavelength void or low-index region can form dielectric slot waveguides [20]. On the
other hand, an MIM configuration can be regarded as plasmonic slot waveguide, in which most power exists in the
insulator region (usually of subwavelength dimension), between metal claddings. Figs. 1(a) and (b) show the
resemblance of the mode profiles of these two modes, when identical polarization and power flux are assumed. Fig. 1(c)
displays similar hyperbolic cosine mode profile in both cases. Inspired by this similarity, we propose the “slot-to-slot”
coupling scheme to direct light from dielectric slot-waveguides into metal slot-waveguides, as shown in Fig. 2. In Fig.
2(b), we show 2D finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) simulation result of this slot-to-slot configuration, which
reports a 62% transmittance for a 1-μm-long MIM slot. By sweeping the slot length L, spectrum response similar to that
reported in [19] is observed.
From a practical view, however, the plain slot-to-slot scheme is very hard to demonstrate on silicon-on-insulator (SOI)
platform without using focused ion beam. To overcome the fabrication challenge, we firstly notice that the power skin
depth of metal at λ=1550 nm is only a few nanometers. Therefore, two metal films embedded apart in a dielectric
background can form a good quasi-MIM waveguide as shown in Fig. 3. The metal film can be deposited simply by
evaporation and liftoff process, following the fabrication of a dielectric slot-waveguide.

600 1
1
400
(a) 0.9 (c)
0.8 Silicon slot
200
0.7 MIM slot
0.6
0.8
Z (nm)

0 0.5
0.4
-200
0.3
0.2
-400
0.6
|Ey| (a.u.)

0.1
-600
-600 -400 -200 0 200 400 600
Y (nm)
600 1
0.4
400
(b) 0.9

0.8
0.7
200
0.6
Z (nm)

0 0.5 0.2
0.4
-200
0.3
0.2
-400
0.1 0
-600
-600 -400 -200 0 200 400 600
-500 -250 0 250 500
Y (nm) Y (nm)

Figure 1. (a) The power distribution in a dielectric slot waveguide; (b) The field distribution in a metal slot
waveguide. Identical power flux is assumed for (a) and (b). The power density in MIM slot is obviously higher
because of the presence of metal; (c) The field (|Ey |) comparison (line-scan from Figs. 1(a) and (b)) between
dielectric and MIM slot. MIM slot exhibits better field confinement as expected.

The 3D structure is designed and modeled by a commercial FDTD package [21] that supports ununiform meshing and
eigenmode calculation. We use non-uniform meshing to resolve the metal boundaries of this device by 2 nm grid in
transverse plane (normal to the propagation direction). Only at structures away from the plasmonic region, the mesh grid
size is gradually increased to decrease the total simulation time without sacrifice of accuracy. A dielectric slot is
designed onto a silicon-on-insulator (SOI) wafer. A cross-section of 260 nm by 460 nm is assumed for a single mode
(SM) silicon wire that supports a fundamental TM mode for near infrared light at 1550 nm. The slot width W is taken as
120 nm. A plasmonic region with a total length of 500 nm is then formed by isotropically adding a thin layer (~ 20 nm)
of metal over the silicon slot, which produces an airgap of D = 80 nm. A quasi-TM polarization is used to retrieve an
eigenmode (Fig. 4, bottom right) of the silicon slot as the beam source. Figure 4 illustrates the principle of the coupler
(top) and how transverse electric field Ey changes progressively (bottom) along the propagation. The silicon slot mode
inside the input port (Fig. 4, bottom right) is directly coupled into the MIM structure in a butt-end manner as reported in

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[19]. Note that the thin layer of metal may not be a perfect cladding required for a pure MIM mode, as indicated by the
field existing in silicon shown in Figure 4 (bottom center) and Figure 3(b). Figure 3(b) shows the eigenmode of the
configuration of Figure 2(a) given by mode-solver, which can be compared with the FDTD result inside the MIM region
given by Figure 4 (bottom center). After propagating for 500 nm, the MIM mode is converted back to a silicon slot mode
inside the output port (Fig. 4, bottom left). Similar prototype and its spectrum response have also been reported in [19]
with no slots. The conversion efficiency is evaluated by calculating the flux in propagating direction inside the output
port, and then normalized to the power integration of source subtracting the reflection before the source. For the MIM
length of about 500 nm, the normalized transmission is close to 50%. The estimated propagation loss of ~2 dB/μm
makes the practical MIM length below a few micrometers. Our simulation shows that at L < 600 nm, the maximum
transmission can go above 50%. When L keeps increasing, the propagation loss dominates and transmission decreases
very fast when L approaches SPP’s propagation distance.

Au
Si
D Air W
L

(a)

(b)

Figure 2. (a) The layout of slot-to-slot coupler; (b) The power distribution from 2D FDTD simulation for slot-to-
slot coupler.

3. FABRICATION AND CHARACTERIZATION

To fabricate the coupler based on silicon slot waveguide, we develop a two-stepped process. Since we focus on
observing the coupling between dielectric slot mode and quasi-MIM slot mode, we did not make optimization on
reducing insertion loss from silicon ridge waveguide to silicon slot waveguide. At the beginning an SOI wafer piece is
patterned by electron-beam lithography (EBL) and inductively coupled plasma (ICP) plasma etch to form SM silicon
waveguides with cross-section dimension of about 250 nm by 460 nm, with a slot inside the waveguide for an area of 50
μm by 120 nm. This platform is then exposed by EBL again with bi-layer PMMA for lift-off. It is necessary to note that
the thickness of bottom layer of the bi-layer PMMA should go beyond or at least be close to the height of silicon ridge to
ensure complete coverage and successful lift-off. After development in MIBK and IPA mixture, a 20 μm by 500 nm

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window is opened right on the center of the 50-μm-long silicon slot where obliquely evaporated gold can attach to
substrate, followed by metal lift-off.
We have evaporated several nanometers of titanium as adhesion layer before deposition of gold for ~18nm. Such a thin
layer of deposition will be less directional and the sidewall of the silicon slot will be coated to form an air slot between
gold screens. It is also important to guarantee the good film quality especially when oblique evaporation is a must for
this process. Previous work on oblique evaporation [22] suggests the beam angle should be monitored to avoid grazing
angle deposition. The scanning electron micrographs shown in Fig. 5(a) describe how the metal covers a short length (L)
in a silicon slot. The quasi-MIM slot has obviously smaller slot width (WMIM = 95 nm) than the dielectric slot (Wd = 124
nm), which indicates the existence of very thin metal screens inside the gap. The top-view shown in Fig. 5(c) gives the
outlook of the fabricated device with very good alignment.

gold
silicon

silica

(a) (b)
Figure 3. (a) The cross-section view of the quasi-MIM structure; (b) The cross-section view of the field
distribution |Ey| for the quasi-MIM structure from eigenmode calculation.

The fabricated sample is then mounted onto a testing stage that can be aligned to two tapered fibers, acting as the input
and output ports respectively. A tunable laser with the maximum output power of 20 mW is used as the probing source.
With proper alignment, the device will exhibit propagation of near-infrared light and the propagation can be viewed by
an infrared camera working with a microscope (Fig. 5(b)). There is considerable scattering when light is coupled
between the dielectric strip waveguide and the dielectric slot waveguide due to mode profile mismatch, which accounts
for a large part of insertion loss. This issue can be addressed by strip-to-slot waveguide transformers [23,24], where
nearly perfect coupling can be achieved. Although the waveguide looks dark compared to the radiation from material
boundaries, the bright scattering point of Fig. 5(b) on the leftmost side verifies that a considerable amount of light has
passed through the whole slot region. To calculate the coupling efficiency, the output of a reference device with no MIM
coverage is at first measured to be 10 μW at 1520 nm when the input power level is 10 mW. We then normalize the
output of a device with 500-nm-long MIM region (3.6 μW) to this reference output. This leads to a 36% coupling
efficiency.

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 y
L = 500 nm
x
Output Port Au z Input Port
W = 120 nm D = 80 nm

Silicon

Ey Ey Ey

Output Port MIM Input Port

Figure 4. 3D FDTD results of transverse electric field changing along propagation. Light comes from the right
hand side.

4. DISCUSSION
Compared to grating couplers that have been widely used to convert optical signal into SPP wave, the direct coupling
scheme is expected to have larger operating bandwidth. To verify this assumption, we use a Labview script to scan the
wavelength of the tunable laser and collect the transmittance accordingly. Here the input source’s power level is locked
at 10 mW (half of the power level for the previous single frequency characterization). We again normalize the output of
devices to a reference structure without quasi-MIM region. The result of the reference structure (without MIM region)
indicates that the platform supports efficient propagation of light with larger wavelength than 1440 nm (and the upper
limit is likely to be larger than 1520 nm). Spectrum sweep is then performed again for two MIM cases (500 nm and 2
μm). After smoothing the results for the two MIM designs and zooming into 1460 nm to 1515 nm, we find the spectrum
response is flat and the Fabry-Perot effect is visible but smoothed by the propagation loss (Figure 6(a)). It is then
expected that current design exhibits acceptable performance for the region of 1440 nm to 1520 nm (and likely with
higher upper band than 1520 nm). This also qualitatively agrees well with 3D FDTD simulation result (Figure 6(b)).

(a) (b)
Wd = 124 nm

WMIM = 95 nm

(c) Silicon slot

plasmonic slot

Figure 5. (a) An SEM picture for the slot view; (b) The near-infrared camera picture for the device working at
1520 nm light. Power comes from the right hand side. Scattering spot is recognizable at left hand side. (c)
Microscope picture of the device’s topview.

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This broadband feature is very important and attractive compared to using grating for momentum match, if the
plasmonic junction is designed to be used as a coupler or a transceiver. The wider band compared to grating coupling is
actually expected because direct coupling is facilitated by “funneling” of power into MIM slot, rather than impedance
match or mode overlap [25]. The mechanism of the nano-funneling effect can be numerically studied by transmission
line theory [26] or antenna theory that has been carried out for microwave region. We believe the scheme proposed here
can be further optimized if the mechanism of direct coupling can be realized more thoroughly.

4
2000-nm MIM
3.5 500-nm MIM

2.5
Power (μW)

1.5

0.5

0
1460 1470 1480 1490 1500 1510
Wavelength (nm)

(a)

(b)

Figure 6. (a) Spectrum response of two quasi-MIM devices from experiments. (b) Spectrum response of 500-nm-
long quasi-MIM devices from 3D FDTD results.

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 5. CONCLUSION
In this paper, we describe the design and demonstration of an integrated coupler that combines plasmonic devices with
dielectric waveguides for near infrared light. The performance of this coupler matches with 3D FDTD simulation, proves
efficient coupling, acceptable bandwidth and straightforward fabrication. As mentioned in many previous studies, MIM
waveguides with gold cladding and low-index dielectric thin-film core (< 100 nm) support fundamental TM mode (for
~1.55-μm light) with a propagation loss in the order of a few dB per micrometer. Based on the platform described in this
paper and following traditional setup such as [27], development of plasmonic switches or modulators with an active
length of only a few micrometers is possible.

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