Excitation of plasmonic gap waveguides by nanoantennas

We model and optimize the excitation of a plasmonic gap waveguide by a dipole antenna. The coupling efficiency strongly depends on antenna and waveguide properties where impedance matching plays a critical role. The optimization of antenna lengths and gap widths shows that concepts of circuit networks can likewise be applied to optical frequencies. Using classical optimization schemes known from electrical engineering we manage to increase the coupling efficiency by a factor of 129 compared with the situation without antennas.