We demonstrate that surface plasmon polaritons can be guided by nanometer-scale dielectric waveguides on top of a gold film. In a test experiment, plasmons were coupled to a curved 3μm radius dielectric stripe, which was 200nm wide and 138nm thick, using a parabolic surface coupler. This experiment demonstrates that using surface plasmon polaritons the scale of optoelectronic devices based on dielectric waveguides can be shrunk by at least an order of magnitude.

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