Recently I read several papers about loss compensation of plasmonic waveguides by introducing the gain material. All authors care about the value of the material gain, if a small material gain is sufficient for less propagation, the corresponding plasmonic waveguide is more attractive. This is what I am stuck at. Why the smaller material gain the better?
From what I know, material gain in those papers usually means the minimum gain required to obtain transparency (or lossless) for the waveguide. So, smaller material gain means it is easier for the material to compensate the waveguide loss. If the material gain required is too high (which usually means the waveguide is very lossy), we might not be able to find any suitable material in the world to provide enough gain to compensate the loss. In short, material gain=material gain required to reach transparency.
This is just my thought, others might have better explanation.
Thanks, Dr. Lee. Now I understand why authors did their bests to reduce the propagation loss before introducing the gain material.
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