Novel instrument for surface plasmon polariton tracking in space and time

Abstract

We describe the realization of a phase-sensitive and ultrafast near-field microscope, optimized for investigation of surface plasmon polariton propagation. The apparatus consists of a homebuilt near-field microscope that is incorporated in Mach-Zehnder-type interferometer which enables heterodyne detection. We show that this microscope is able to measure dynamical properties of both photonic and plasmonic systems with phase sensitivity.

Triggering extreme events at the nanoscale in photonic seas

“…-To image the light-field distributions inside the chaotic resonators we use a home-built NSOM, whose operation is described in detail in [29,41], and therefore we here limit to present the main results. Briefly, an aperture probe that consists of an aluminum-coated tapered SiO2 fiber with a 100-300 nm sized aperture, is placed at a distance of 20 nm of the surface, within the evanescent tail of the electromagnetic field inside the cavity.…”

“…Phase control in the wave ensemble is then achieved by using tunable losses, represented by outgoing waveguide channels of specific widths. Our integrated chips, together with State-of-the-Art Near Field Scanning Optical Microscope (NSOM) imaging techniques [29], allow us to measure both the amplitude and the phase of light with nanometre and femtosecond accuracy. In our integrated platform, we triggered the experimental generation of ultrafast (163-fs long) and subwavelength (206nm wide) rogue waves at the wavelength λ = 1.55µm.…”

Spatiotemporal control of light in turbid media

“…A pinhole fixes the spatial coordinate. To fix the time, the speckle pulse is overlapped with a reference pulse in a heterodyne detection scheme in a configuration similar to [124]. For an extended technical and analytical description of this technique, we refer the reader to appendix 3.A.1.…”

“…In the reference arm, two acousto-optical modulators (AOM) shift the light frequency by 40 kHz, which enables heterodyne detection of the transmitted pulses [124].…”

Local and dynamic properties of light interacting with subwavelength holes

“…The relative pulse delay can be determined by comparing the position of the interferogram when the pulse propagates through a sample with the position of the interferogram when the pulse propagates through a reference structure. To obtain amplitude and phase of the interference signal simultaneously we use a heterodyning lock-in technique [62] in which the light in the reference branch is shifted 9 MHz using two acousto-optic modulators. From the detected signal we construct the complex interferogram.…”