Highly confined light guiding in a low-loss hybrid Bloch surface waveguide

In order to further enhance the electric field confinement ability of the Bloch surface polariton waveguides, here, a new hybrid Bloch surface polariton waveguide is proposed to reduce the mode size while still maintaining the long-range transmission distance of the conventional Bloch surface polariton waveguide. By incorporating an ellipse dielectric nanowire with the photonic crystal slab combined with a sandwiched dielectric nano-ridge, the weak mode confinement ability of the Bloch surface polariton mode can be compensated effectively. For the considered structural parameters, the modal properties of the hybrid waveguide are quantitatively investigated to demonstrate subwavelength mode confinement ability along with ultra-low propagation loss. The nice optical performance of the presented hybrid waveguide structure could serve as a promising building block for many high-performance integrated optical devices.