Performance-enhanced superluminescent diode with surface plasmon waveguide.

Super luminescent Diode (SLD) with a new structure is proposed in which light is guided by surface plasmon waveguide (SPWG) rather than by the conventional dielectric waveguide. This results in a great increase of the spontaneous emission coupling. Other parameters important to the device operation such as the confinement factor, waveguide loss and waveguide facets reflectivities are also considered. It is shown that the new design outperforms the conventional ones using dielectric waveguides in both the output power and optical spectral width.