Plasmonic Airy Beam Generated by In-Plane Diffraction

Abstract

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.

Considerations on the electromagnetic flow in Airy beams based on the Gouy phase

“…Potential applications of our results to recent experiments employing AiBs [11] are also outlined. They include optical manipulation of small particles [12], generation of curved plasma channels in air [13,14], and generation of surface plasmons with parabolic trajectories [15][16][17][18], to mention a few.…”

Shaping symmetric Airy beam through binary amplitude modulation for ultralong needle focus

“…13,14 Direct generation of the Airy beam from laser cavity could be realized by imprinting an aperiodic binary grating on the output coupling mirror. 15 The Airy modes also exist in the form of non-diffracting surface plasmon, [16][17][18] self-accelerating acoustics, 19 electron beams, 20 as well as spatiotemporal non-spreading light bullets. 21 In the present work, an ultra-long needle focus was experimentally generated through the creation of a rectangularly symmetric Airy beam (SAB) 22,23 with binary spectral amplitude modulation.…”

Semiconductor laser beam bending

“…These studies also proposed that these waves could be used in different ways in optical micromanipulation [15], plasma guidance [16,17], and routing surface plasmon polaritons [18][19][20]. It was also found that, like Airy beams, Bessel waves have the same feature [18][19][20][21]. Due to the force of gravity, Airy beams move in their path along parabolic * Correspondence: fvcelebi@ybu.edu.tr trajectories.…”