The slot waveguide has attracted considerable attention because of its ability to confine and guide electromagnetic energy at the subwavelength scale beyond the diffraction limit. We propose a novel terahertz slot waveguide structure to achieve a better tradeoff between propagation length and field confinement capacity, the novel waveguide consisting of a two slot structure. The performances of terahertz waveguides were investigated using the finite-element method. The results demonstrated that the hybrid slot waveguide (HSW) provides significantly enhanced field confinement in low index slot regions: more than five times that of traditional low index slot waveguides (LISWs). An optimized HSW structure was achieved by tuning the tradeoff between mode confinement and propagation length. We also showed that its integration in conventional planar waveguide circuits was greatly improved compared with the LISWs, by comparing their crosstalk. The proposed new HSW structure has great potential to enable THz production of compact integration and could lead to true semiconductor-basedTHz applications with high performance.

The emerging field of nanophotonics requires plasmonic devices to be fully compatible with semiconductor fabrication techniques. However, very few feasible practical structures exist at present. Here, we propose a CMOS-compatible hybrid plasmonic slot waveguide (HPSW) with enhanced field confinement. Our simulation results show that the HPSW exhibits significantly enhanced field confinement as compared with the traditional low-index slot waveguides and the hybrid metal dielectric slot waveguides. By controlling the thicknesses of different layers, an optimized HPSW structure with a better tradeoff between field confinement and propagation length has been simultaneously achieved.