Abstract
We study the excitation and propagation of surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) on a micron-sized thin gold stripe. Grating couplers are embedded for both excitation of SPPs and detection after propagation. The experimental setup allows measuring of the decay length of the SPPs on the gold stripe excited in the near infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum. We show that SPPs are transmitted with a surprisingly high probability across a tapered constriction, with smallest lateral dimensions of atomic size.
Highlights
Plasmonic devices have been proposed to realize particular functionalities in optoelectronic devices, because they promise to overcome the size mismatch between nanometre-sized electronic building blocks and the microscale used in optics and photonics devices [1,2,3]
Plasmonic devices allow manipulating light on a scale well below its wavelength. One aspect of these devices deals with the transport of surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) towards a small area for focusing electro-magnetic waves
We showed in experiment and simulation that SPPs which are excited by grating couplers directly in a gold stripe and travel along the stripe have a shortened decay length compared to an infinite gold film
Summary
Plasmonic devices have been proposed to realize particular functionalities in optoelectronic devices, because they promise to overcome the size mismatch between nanometre-sized electronic building blocks and the microscale used in optics and photonics devices [1,2,3]. Plasmonic devices allow manipulating light on a scale well below its wavelength One aspect of these devices deals with the transport of surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) towards a small area for focusing electro-magnetic (em) waves. An em wave with a wavelength of several hundred nanometres in vacuum can be focused down to a few nanometres owing to the bound state of SPPs at a metallic surface [4,5,6,7] Such an application requires a suitable waveguide for the transport of the SPPs towards the desired area [8,9,10,11,12,13]. The interpretation of these experiments is hampered by the fact that the SPP intensity transmitted at the atomic contact and across it is not known, because a near-field optical measurement setup cannot be integrated into these experiments
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