1804 IEEE PHOTONICS TECHNOLOGY LETTERS, VOL. 19, NO.

22, NOVEMBER 15, 2007

Analysis of Surface Plasmon Polariton

Using Anisotropic Finite Elements
Min Yan and Min Qiu

Abstract—The anisotropic finite-element mesh is deployed in

a vector finite-element method to numerically derive surface
plasmon polaritons (SPPs) more efficiently. The superiority of the
anisotropic mesh lies in the fact that SPP modes, predictably, have
a sharp field variation in the surface-normal direction, whereas
the variation along the surface-tangent direction is comparably
gentle. A case study on metallic fiber shows that the employment
of anisotropic finite elements reduces the problem size by a factor
of seven.
Index Terms—Anisotropic finite element, finite-element method
(FEM), surface plasmon polariton (SPP).

I. INTRODUCTION

ECENTLY, there has been an increase of interest in
R surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) [1]. An SPP mode
is guided by a metal-dielectric interface, owing to coupling
of photons and an electron cloud that exists within the metal.
SPPs excited by visible and infrared lightwaves are consid-
ered promising for integrated optics and sensing applications.
In the case of 1-D flat SPP waveguide, there exists an ana-
lytical solution for the guided mode (see Fig. 1). However,
practical SPP waveguides usually have confinement in two
dimensions in order to achieve high-density integration of
the optical circuits. Such waveguides either have a curved
or corrugated single surface (e.g., the V-channel waveguide
[2]), or have two or more coupled metal-dielectric interfaces
(e.g., the metal-slot waveguide [3]). To analyze such complex
waveguides, it is necessary to resort to numerical methods. Pre-
vious theoretical analyses of such SPP waveguides are mainly
limited to the effective index method (EIM) [4] and methods
based on finite-difference scheme, such as the finite-difference
time-domian (FDTD) method [5]–[7] and the beam propagation
method (BPM) [8]. EIM neglects the hybrid polarization nature
of the modes. Therefore, its accuracy is limited. FDTD and
BPM use a rectangular mesh. Such mesh interprets material
interfaces, especially slanted ones, poorly. Since the field of an
SPP mode is at its maximum at exactly the material interfaces,
the staircase approximation of the interface is likely to induce
Manuscript received April 18, 2007; revised July 23, 2007. This work was
supported by the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research (SSF) through the
INGVAR Program, by the SSF Strategic Research Center in Photonics, and by
the Swedish Research Council (VR).
The authors are with the Department of Microelectronics and Applied
Physics, Royal Institute of Technology, 164 40 Kista, Stockholm, Sweden
(e-mail: min@kth.se).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this letter are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LPT.2007.906832
1041-1135/$25.00 © 2007 IEEE
Fig. 1. H field of the z -propagating SPP guided by a flat Ag–air interface at
0.633- and 1-m wavelengths. The fields in the two materials are analytical in
exponential functions. Inset schematically shows the surface guide. The field is
constant along the x direction.
a large numerical error. In addition, the mesh of a traditional
FDTD or BPM is of uniform resolution. SPPs usually have a
highly localized mode field. Uniform mesh will lead to a slow
convergence of the method in deriving such modes. In com-
parison, the finite-element method (FEM) has the advantage of
defining the material interfaces accurately, straight or curved.
Moreover, FEM uses an unstructured adaptive mesh, and high
numerical resolution can be imposed wherever necessary. Due
to these two reasons, FEM is expected to achieve convergence
faster than FDTD or BPM. A report on FEM calculation of
SPP waveguides has appeared in [9]. The commercial software
COMSOL is also seen to be able to derive SPP modes (for
example, see [10]). Notice in [9], the FEM employed only
deals with lossless materials. The mode propagation loss is then
obtained by perturbation analysis.
In this letter, we report the deployment of a nonclassical type
of finite-element mesh for calculating SPP modes with FEM.
For certain problems, the solution of the governing partial dif-
ferential equation sometimes is anisotropic. That is, the solution
may vary sharply only along a particular direction in parts of the
computational domain. The SPP fields guided by almost all met-
allodielectric waveguides fall into this category. Conventional
FEM usually uses a Delaunay or isotropic mesh, which ignores
any anisotropy property of the solution. To solve the problem
more efficiently, the finite-element mesh should adapt to the
anisotropy of the solution [11]. The resultant mesh appears to
be highly stretched in the direction along which the variation of
the solution is comparatively slow. The Delauley property is no
longer satisfied by the mesh. We commonly refer to such a mesh
as an anisotropic finite-element mesh. The efficiencies of using
YAN AND QIU: ANALYSIS OF SPP USING ANISOTROPIC FINITE ELEMENTS
Fig. 2. Schematic finite-element meshes of a domain with a material interface,
denoted by the red line. (a) Conventional mesh. (b) Anisotropic mesh.
both anisotropic and conventional meshes through an identical
FEM algorithm for deriving an SPP mode will be compared in
the following.
II. ANISOTROPIC FINITE-ELEMENT ANALYSIS
The employed FEM is based upon the vector wave equation
governing the transverse magnetic field, which can be written
as [12], by assuming harmonic dependence
(1)
In (1), we have considered material constants in the tensor form
of and . and values are relative
ones. is the free-space wave number, and is the propaga-
tion constant to be derived. All values except are, in general,
complex. The effective mode index is defined as . converges negatively. In Fig. 3, we show the relative errors of
In deriving (1), the divergence-free condition for magnetic field,
, has been imposed. Therefore, such a formulation
can suppress the appearance of spurious modes [12]. Our im-
plementation of the method has unknowns defined at the nodes,
and the second-order shape function has been used to accelerate
convergence.
In Fig. 2(a), we show a conventional finite-element mesh, in
which high numerical resolution is applied adaptively in accor-
dance to the curved material interface. The advantage of FEM
using such a mesh is obvious as compared to FDTD in their abil-
ities of capturing an SPP mode. However, if we acknowledge
that the field variation in the surface-tangent direction is much
slower than in the surface-normal direction, the finite-element
mesh can be refined one step further by reducing the mesh reso-
lution along the surface-tangent direction, as shown in Fig. 2(b).
The mesh in Fig. 2(b) leads to about only one half number of un-
knowns as compared to the mesh in Fig. 2(a).
We choose a silver fiber with radius m placed in
air for our case study. A fiber is chosen because an analytical
solution exists for its perfect cylindrical structure. The wave-
length is fixed at 0.633 m, at which the epsilon value for silver
is [13]. The outer cladding is also of cir-
cular shape, which has a radius of 8 m. The domain is large
enough so the evanescent field has decayed to an almost neg-
1805
ligible value. This allows the outer boundary to be zero-value
conditioned. We have used only one quarter of the problem
domain by applying appropriate symmetry conditions on the
reflection axes. The meshes are generated using the freely avail-
able Gmsh.1 Resolutions of the meshes are controlled in the fol-
lowing manner. For both conventional and anisotropic meshing
schemes, the core and clad circles are descretized to roughly the
same number (denoted as ) of line segments. That is, the seg-
ment length on the clad circle is about 5.3 times as large as that
on the core circle. For the conventional meshing, the triangle
size then grows linearly from core to clad boundary, driven by
a Delaunay triangulation algorithm. In the anisotropic meshing,
the mesh is refined by a factor of five in the surface-normal di-
rection at the core–clad interface, and the mesh size in the sur-
face-normal direction is allowed to increase with distance (to
the interface) until the size matches that on the clad circle. The
increasing rate is denoted mathematically in the multiplication
factor as . In both cases, meshes with different resolu-
tions are obtained by only varying .
Although the fiber guides multiple modes, we only focus on
the fundamental one. Analytically, the fields in the core and
clad regions can be written as modified Bessel functions of the
first and second kind, respectively. A tangential field matching
at the core–clad interface gives the modal solution of
. Numerically, for each type of
finite-element mesh, we test the convergence by increasing the
overall resolution (parameter ). The derived mode value
is recorded at every resolution level (denoted by the number of
unknowns, or the degree of freedom). The values calculated
using two types of meshes are both converging to the analytic so-
lution. The real part converges positively and the imaginary part
the computed values. The error (computed for the individual
real or imaginary part) is calculated by taking the difference in
absolute value between the numerical and the analytic results,
which is further divided by the analytic result. The anisotropic
FEM is noticed to approach convergence significantly faster
than the conventional FEM, both in real and imaginary parts
of the value. At the initial stage, an increase in mesh reso-
lution for anisotropic FEM is seen to reduce the computational
error more drastically. As the mesh resolution increases further,
both types of meshing schemes bring their errors down at about
the same rate. At a large degree of freedom, the error in
by anisotropic FEM is about 45 times smaller than that by con-
ventional FEM. And the error in by anisotropic FEM is
about 75 times smaller. This figure also quantitatively confirms
that an anisotropic mesh with a degree of freedom of 15 482
(error at in real part and in imaginary
part) gives better accuracy than a conventional mesh with a de-
gree of freedom of 111 282 (error at in real part and
in imaginary part) for this particular problem. That
is, the problem size is reduced by a factor seven by employing
the anisotropic mesh. At a even higher accuracy requirement,
the size reduction of the problem can be more handsome due to
1Gmsh Version 1.65. Gmsh is a free finite-element mesh generator developed
by Christophe Geuzaine et al.
1806
Fig. 3. Comparison of relative errors in both (a) real part and (b) imaginary
n
part of the value.
small slopes of the error curves at a large number of unknowns
(Fig. 3).
In the fiber’s cylindrical coordinate, the azimuthal magnetic
field of the mode derived using an anisotropic mesh with 15 482
unknowns is shown in Fig. 4. The field is interpolated on 301
radial points with a constant spacing. The analytic solution is
also superimposed for comparison. The two fields are almost
identical. The complete cross-sectional pattern of the field
is shown in the inset of Fig. 4.
III. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION
Although in this letter we have studied only the metallic
fiber, anisotropic finite-element mesh can be readily used for
many other types of metallodielectric surface waveguides. We
have recently applied such anisotropic mesh to investigate some
of the V-channel and -wedge plasmon polariton waveguides
presented in [14]. We would also like to mention that the
anisotropic meshing parameters used in our case study are
not optimized. For example, the mesh refinement factor in the
surface-normal direction at the core–clad interface can be a
value other than five, and the refinement can be relaxed in a
different rate too. Further improvement in efficiency is possible.
In conclusion, we have reported the deployment of
anisotropic triangular meshes in a vector FEM to calculate
IEEE PHOTONICS TECHNOLOGY LETTERS, VOL. 19, NO. 22, NOVEMBER 15, 2007
H
H
Fig. 4. Comparison of the field calculated from anisotropic FEM (with
H
15482 unknowns) and the analytic solution. Inset shows the j j field (col-
ormap), and the field (quiver).
SPPs. Significant savings on computational cost, measured in
the degree of freedom of the matrix problem, is noticed from a
case study on a metallic fiber.
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