Surface plasmon converging and diverging properties modulated by polymer refractive structures on metal films

Abstract

Polymer refractive microstructures are fabricated on metallic thin films and employed to modulate surface plasmons (SPs) propagations in a refractive manner. SP waves converging with different focal lengths and diverging effects are realized by the refractive structures. Authors investigated the modulation effect on SP waves as a function of different thicknesses and different shapes of the polymer micro-structures based on the effective refractive index model, where imaging properties of the SPs are observed experimentally by detecting the leaky radiation intensity of the SPs.