Design and Analysis of a Novel Plasmonic Power Splitter Based on an Air-Slot Coupler

Power splitters are used to achieve high density and cost effective optical integrated circuits. Based on an air-slot coupler, we introduce a plasmonic power splitter that achieves high coupling efficiency over a broad frequency range which entails lower-precision fabrication processes to align its two-branches to the conventional dielectric waveguide (CDW). We found that tapering the width of the two CDWs not only increases the coupling efficiency into and out of the MDM plasmonic waveguides, but also reduces the oscillations in the measured transmitted coupling efficiency into the output CDW and increases the fabrication tolerance when placing the two MDM branches between the two CDWs. Our results show that the proposed power splitter has potential applications in the optical data communications.