Helicity dependent directional surface plasmon polariton excitation using a metasurface with interfacial phase discontinuity

By Lingling Huang, Xianzhong Chen, B. Bai, Qiaofeng Tan, Guofan Jin, T. Zentgraf, Shuang Zhang. Light: Science & Applications, 2013

537 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) have been widely exploited in various scientific communities, ranging from physics, chemistry to biology, due to the strong confinement of light to the metal surface. For many applications, it is important that the free space photon can be coupled to SPPs in a controllable manner. In this Letter, we apply the concept of interfacial phase discontinuity for circularly polarizations on a metasurface to the design of a novel type of polarization-dependent SPP unidirectional excitation at normal incidence. Selective unidirectional excitation of SPPs along opposite directions is experimentally demonstrated at optical frequencies by simply switching the helicity of the incident light. This approach, in conjunction with dynamic polarization modulation techniques, opens gateway towards integrated plasmonic circuits with electrically reconfigurable functionalities. Researchers have now demonstrated a reconfigurable, unidirectional coupling scheme for excitation of collective oscillations of the electrons at a metal surface, the so-called surface plasmon-polaritons. Lingling Huang and co-workers achieved an efficient and controllable coupling of photons in free space to these surface states on a metal film — a task important for the future development of nanoscale optoelectronic circuitry — by employing a nanostructured thin metal film on a glass substrate. The nanostructured metal film features an array of rectangular nano-apertures arranged in a carefully designed orientation and pattern. Such a ‘plasmonic metasurface’ couples photons to surface plasmon-polaritons while depending crucially on the circular polarization state of the incident light. As a result, when circularly polarized light strikes the surface, the handedness of the light dictates the propagation direction of the resulting surface plasmon-polaritons.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Biomedical Engineering, Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/45ecdac3acc19037d89ad4bb028700b048461139

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

1. Qiong He
2. Lei Zhou
3. Shulin Sun
4. He-xiu Xu
5. Guangming Wang
6. F. Capasso
7. N. Yu
8. S. A. Maier

In Biomedical Engineering

1. Lei Zhou
2. Shulin Sun
3. Qiong He
4. He-xiu Xu
5. Guangming Wang
6. F. Capasso
7. S. A. Maier

In Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

1. Qiong He
2. Lei Zhou
3. Shulin Sun
4. He-xiu Xu
5. Guangming Wang
6. F. Capasso
7. N. Yu
8. T. Cui

Citations in the corpus

• High-efficiency and full-space manipulation of electromagnetic wave-fronts with metasurfaces (2017, background): “Recently, metamaterials (artificial materials made by subwavelength microstructures with tailored EM properties) and particularly their planar version, metasurfaces, have demonstrated strong capabilities to manipulate EM waves, generating many fascinating effects such as anomalous refraction/reflect”
• Electromagnetic metasurfaces: physics and applications (2019, unknown): “(b) Experimental observation of the SPP excitation along the right direction inside the metacoupler for an incident beam with σ 1 [204].”
• Ultracompact metasurface in-line polarimeter (2016, background): “This issue was recently addressed in the context of unidirectional surface-plasmon– polariton propagation [8,9,13].”