Shrinking light: Waveguiding scheme enables highly confined subnanometer optical fields

Phys.org  July 17, 2023 Researchers in China developed an optical waveguide scheme to generate a sub-nanometer-confined optical field in a nano slit waveguiding mode in a coupled nanowire pair (CNP). They showed that, when a conventional waveguide mode with a proper polarization was evanescently coupled into a properly designed CNP with a central nano slit, it could be channeled into a high-purity nano slit mode within a waveguiding length <10 μm. The CNP could be either freestanding or on-chip by using a tapered fiber or planar waveguide for input-coupling, with a coupling efficiency up to 95%. Within the slit region, […]