We report an experimental realization of a plasmonic Airy beam, which is generated thoroughly on a silver surface. With a carefully designed nanoarray structure, such Airy beams come into being from an in-plane propagating surface plasmon polariton wave, exhibiting nonspreading, self-bending, and self-healing properties. Besides, a new phase-tuning method based on nonperfectly matched diffraction processes is proposed to generate and modulate the beam almost at will. This unique plasmonic Airy beam as well as the generation method would significantly promote the evolutions in in-plane surface plasmon polariton manipulations and indicate potential applications in lab-on-chip photonic integrations.

We worked out a new group of collimated plasmon beams by the means of in-plane diffraction with symmetric phase modulation. As the phase type changes from 1.8 to 1.0, the beam undergoes an interesting evolution from focusing to a straight line.Upon this, an intuitive diagram was proposed to elucidate the beam nature and answer the question whether they are nondiffracting or linear focusing. Based on this diagram, we further achieved a highly designable scheme to modulate the beam intensity (e.g., "lossless" plasmon). Our finding holds remarkable generality and flexibility in beam engineering and would inspire more intriguing photonic designs.

The propagation of microwaves through a chiral metamaterial based on a magnetic dimer is experimentally studied. As proposed by our previous theoretical model, two resonance peaks are obtained in the transmission spectrum; these originate from the hybridization effect of magnetic resonance modes in this system. Optical activity is also observed in the transmission wave. The polarization state dramatically changes around the resonance frequency: the transmitted wave becomes elliptically polarized with its major polarization axis approximately perpendicular to that of the linear incident wave. This coupled magnetic dimer system provides a practical method to optically design tunable active medium and device.

We propose and analyze theoretically a double magnetic plasmon resonance nanolaser, in which Ytterbium-erbium co-doped material is used as the gain medium. Through design of the double magnetic resonance modes, pumping light (980nm) can be resonantly absorbed and laser light (1550nm) can be resonantly generated simultaneously. We introduce a set of rate equations combined to describe the operation of the laser and predict the lasing condition. According to our calculations, the disadvantage that pumping light is difficult to be absorbed by a thin slab of gain materials can be overcome.Comment: 13pages, 4 figure

Photonic quantum information processing system has been widely used in communication, metrology and lithography. The recent emphasis on the miniaturized photonic platform is thus motivated by the urgent need for realizing large-scale information processing and computing. Although the integrated quantum logic gates and quantum algorithms based on path encoding have been successfully demonstrated, the technology for handling another commonly used polarization-encoded qubits has yet to be fully developed. Here, we show the implementation of a polarization-dependent beam-splitter in the hybrid waveguide system. With precisely design, the polarization-encoded controlled-NOT gate can be implemented using only single such polarization-dependent beam-splitter with the significant size reduction of the overall device footprint to 14 × 14 μm2. The experimental demonstration of the highly integrated controlled-NOT gate sets the stage to develop large-scale quantum information processing system. Our hybrid design also establishes the new capabilities in controlling the polarization modes in integrated photonic circuits.

In this paper, we will propose that magnetic resonance nanostructures in a metal surface could be used to realize extraordinary optical transmission (EOT). Toward this goal, we designed and fabricated a one-dimensional diatomic chain of slit-hole resonator (SHR). Due to the strong exchange current interaction, a type of magnetic plasmon (MP) propagation mode with a broad frequency bandwidth was established in this system. Apparent EOT peaks induced by the MP mode were observed in our measured spectra at infrared frequencies. The strongest EOT peak was obtained at 1.07eV with an incident angle of 20 0 . The measured dependence of EOT peaks on the incident angle coincided with the theoretical results quite well. This proposed MP propagation mode in SHR structure has good potential applications in multi-frequency nonlinear optical processes.

We propose a subwavelength waveguide composed of two parallel nanorod chains. Based on the finite-difference time-domain analysis, we find that the electromagnetic energy can be highly confined in the gaps of nanorod pairs and transported in the gap waveguide through strong magnetic coupling interaction between neighboring nanorod pairs. In a structure with the rod length of 500 nm and the gap size of 100 nm, the energy flow cross section of the propagation mode can be restricted to the size of /33ϫ/ 16 at the frequency of 130.0 THz. The corresponding attenuation length of energy propagation reaches 7.2. Moreover, these propagation modes exhibit a broad continuous frequency band from zero up to a cutoff frequency c ϳ 162.6 THz.

No abstract