Abstract
Magnetic skyrmions are topological quasiparticles in magnetization. Recently, as one of their photonic counterparts, Néel-type photonic skyrmions were discovered in evanescent electromagnetic waves. The deep-subwavelength features of the photonic skyrmions suggest their potential in optical imaging quantum technologies and data storage. Here, by exploiting the photonic quantum spin Hall effect of a plasmonic vortex in a trilayered structure, we predict the existence of photonic twisted-Néel- and Bloch-type skyrmions in chiral materials. Their chirality-dependent features can be considered as additional degrees of freedom for future chiral sensing, information processing, and storage technologies. In particular, our findings enrich the formations of photonic skyrmions and reveal a remarkable resemblance of the feature of chiral materials in two seemingly distant fields: photonic skyrmions and magnetic skyrmions.2 MoreReceived 16 December 2020Accepted 9 April 2021DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.3.023109Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.Published by the American Physical SocietyPhysics Subject Headings (PhySH)Research AreasChiralityLight-matter interactionNanophotonicsNear-field opticsPlasmonicsSkyrmionsTopological effects in photonic systemsAtomic, Molecular & Optical
Highlights
Skyrmions, hedgehogs of electron spins, are topologically stable magnetization swirls in magnetic materials
We first take a chiral-metal plasmonic interface as an example and show how a twisted Néel-type photonic skyrmion structure is formed in a plasmonic optical vortex (OV)
We subsequently present the mechanism of extinguishing the transverse spin angular momentum (SAM) (Sr) of the plasmonic OV inside a threelayered metal-chiral-metal structure
Summary
Hedgehogs of electron spins, are topologically stable magnetization swirls in magnetic materials. In common optical materials (isotropic, nonmagnetic, and nonchiral), SPPs solely exist for transverse magnetic (TM) polarization [22] They are confined at the interface between a metal and a dielectic and exponentially decay in the perpendicular direction into the materials. The same mechanism applies to the photonic Néel-type skyrmion lattice generated by the interference of plane-wave SPPs [16,18]. It was shown that Sr ∝ Rek × Imk [23], which indicates that the momentum (propogation) direction, the decay direction, and the transverse spin direction of a SPP constitutes a right-handed system. We show a Bloch-type photonic skyrmion can be realized in a trilayered metal-insulator-metal (MIM) structure with the introduction of chirality
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