ABSTRACT
Nanophotonics and plasmonics are exciting and promising technologies based on the interaction of light with nanostructured materials. Their application in various fields such as communication and all-optical signal processing can make positive contributions to several societal challenges. This chapter presents an overview of sub-wavelength photonic and plasmonic slot waveguides together and discusses their main properties. It describes and summarizes various nanophotonic and plasmonic waveguides based on dielectric, metal, and hybrid dielectric-metal material platforms. The chapter discusses optical performance of coupled metallic nanoparticle double chains and focuses on sub-wavelength slot waveguides for enhancement and confinement of light, three CMOS-compatible waveguide platforms including silicon slot, hybrid silicon-copper dielectric slot and copper slot. Although many successful achievements have been realized with the current photonic integrated circuits (PIC), they are still creating large footprints compared to their electronic counterparts. The performance of the waveguide was computed with the surface integral equation (SIE) method that allows the study on SPs of arbitrarily shaped homogeneous objects.
