Plasmonic Spin-Hall Effect in Surface Plasmon Polariton Focusing

Abstract

Surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) are fundamental collective charge density excitations at surfaces of solid-state plasmas. They can energize physical and chemical processes at the nanoscale, but control of the spatiotemporal evolution of their energy, momentum, and spin is necessary to effectively transfer their quantum properties to molecules and other nanoscopic objects. Thus, to design the coupling of SPPs into other modes of an electronic system, it is important to describe and control their nanofemto spatiotemporal distributions. We investigate the spatial SPP field and spin distributions when launched by illuminating a converging lens coupling structure in an Ag film with obliquely incident linearly or circularly polarized femtosecond light pulses. The propagation and focusing of SPPs are recorded as movies by scanning the pump–probe pulse delay and recording the evolving interference patterns between the SPP and optical fields by ultrafast interferometric time-resolved two-photon photoemission ele...