Surface-Plasmon-Assisted Guiding of Broadband Slow and Subwavelength Light in Air

A class of axially uniform waveguides is introduced, employing a new mechanism to guide light inside a low-index dielectric material without the use of photonic band gap, and simultaneously exhibiting subwavelength modal size and very slow group velocity over an unusually large frequency bandwidth. Their basis is the presence of plasmonic modes on the interfaces between dielectric regions and the flat unpatterned surface of a bulk metallic substrate. These novel waveguides allow for easy broadband coupling and exhibit absorption losses limited only by the intrinsic loss of the metal.