  We demonstrate that surface plasmon polaritons can be guided by nanometer
scale dielectric waveguides. In a test experiment plasmons were coupled to a
curved 3 micrometer radius dielectric stripe, which was 200 nm wide and 138 nm
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.
