Multichannel Transmission Through a Gold Strip Plasmonic Waveguide Embedded in Cytop

Abstract

In this paper, we experimentally characterize a low-loss polymer-based plasmonic waveguide and present its system-level performance for transmitting multiple on-off keying modulated channels (4 × 49 Gb/s). The same waveguide also exhibits the capability of transmitting multiple differential phase shift keying modulated channels (4 × 10 Gb/s). Signal transmission has been verified through bit-error-rate measurements. The plasmonic waveguide consists of a 3.6-mm-long, 5-μm-wide, and 35-nm-thick gold strip embedded in Cytop polymer and exhibits a total optical insertion loss of approximately 13 dB at a free-space optical wavelength of 1.55 μm.