Near-Field Interference for the Unidirectional Excitation of Electromagnetic Guided Modes
By Francisco J. Rodriguez-Fortuno, G. Marino, P. Ginzburg, D. O’Connor, Alejandro Martínez, G. Wurtz, Anatoly V. Zayats. Science, 2013
653 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Controlling Light Propagation Surface plasmons are light-induced collective electronic excitations in a metal that offer the possibility of manufacturing optoelectronic devices at nanometer scale. Before such shrinking can be achieved, the propagation direction and lifetime of the plasmonic excitations have to be controlled (see the Perspective by Miroshnichenko and Kivshar). Rodríguez-Fortuño et al. (p. 328) show how this is done using polarized light. Alternatively, using an array of metallic nanoantennae (in this case, slits) patterned into a thin gold film, Lin et al. (p. 331) present a further improvement on current plasmonic coupling schemes that has the potential to encode information contained in both the intensity and polarization of light. Near-field interference can be used to control the directional propagation of electromagnetic excitations. [Also see Perspective by Miroshnichenko and Kivshar] Wave interference is a fundamental manifestation of the superposition principle with numerous applications. Although in conventional optics, interference occurs between waves undergoing different phase advances during propagation, we show that the vectorial structure of the near field of an emitter is essential for controlling its radiation as it interferes with itself on interaction with a mediating object. We demonstrate that the near-field interference of a circularly polarized dipole results in the unidirectional excitation of guided electromagnetic modes in the near field, with no preferred far-field radiation direction. By mimicking the dipole with a single illuminated slit in a gold film, we measured unidirectional surface-plasmon excitation in a spatially symmetric structure. The surface wave direction is switchable with the polarization.
Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Biomedical Engineering, Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/437c4efd254ab29bceb3751896c9bd57d3812156
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Citations in the corpus
- Quantum matter built from nanoscopic lattices of atoms and photons (2018, background): “The beam polarization can thus acquire a component of the electric field along the direction of propagation, which can have π=2 phase difference with the transversely oriented components (Lin et al., 2013; Rodriguez-Fortuno et al., 2013; Petersen, Volz, and Rauschenbeutel, 2014).”
- Topological photonics (2018, background): “spin-polarized emitters give rise to a spin-controlled unidirectional excitation of surface or guided modes in a wide-range of systems, including metal surfaces (Lee et al., 2012; O’Connor et al., 2014; Rodŕıguez-Fortuño et al., 2013), optical nanofibers (Mitsch et al.”