Cargando…

High-efficiency surface plasmon meta-couplers: concept and microwave-regime realizations

Surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) and their low-frequency counterparts (i.e., spoof SPPs on artificial surfaces) have recently found numerous applications in photonics, but traditional devices to excite them (such as gratings and prism couplers) all suffer from problems of inherent low efficiency be...

Descripción completa

Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Sun, Wujiong, He, Qiong, Sun, Shulin, Zhou, Lei
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Nature Publishing Group 2016
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6059849/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30167110
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/lsa.2016.3
_version_ 1783341932254068736
author Sun, Wujiong
He, Qiong
Sun, Shulin
Zhou, Lei
author_facet Sun, Wujiong
He, Qiong
Sun, Shulin
Zhou, Lei
author_sort Sun, Wujiong
collection PubMed
description Surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) and their low-frequency counterparts (i.e., spoof SPPs on artificial surfaces) have recently found numerous applications in photonics, but traditional devices to excite them (such as gratings and prism couplers) all suffer from problems of inherent low efficiency because the generated SPPs can decouple, returning to free space, and reflections at the device surface can never be avoided. Here, we propose a new SPP excitation scheme based on a transparent gradient metasurface and numerically demonstrate that it exhibits inherently high efficiency (~94%) because the designed meta-coupler suppresses both decoupling and surface reflections. As a practical realization of this concept, we fabricated a meta-coupler for operation in the microwave regime and performed near-field and far-field experiments to demonstrate that the achieved excitation efficiency for spoof SPPs reaches ~73%, which is several times higher than that achieved by other available devices in this frequency domain. Our findings can motivate the design and fabrication of high-performance plasmonic devices to harvest light–matter interactions, particularly those related to spoof SPPs in the low-frequency domain.
format Online
Article
Text
id pubmed-6059849
institution National Center for Biotechnology Information
language English
publishDate 2016
publisher Nature Publishing Group
record_format MEDLINE/PubMed
spelling pubmed-60598492018-08-30 High-efficiency surface plasmon meta-couplers: concept and microwave-regime realizations Sun, Wujiong He, Qiong Sun, Shulin Zhou, Lei Light Sci Appl Original Article Surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) and their low-frequency counterparts (i.e., spoof SPPs on artificial surfaces) have recently found numerous applications in photonics, but traditional devices to excite them (such as gratings and prism couplers) all suffer from problems of inherent low efficiency because the generated SPPs can decouple, returning to free space, and reflections at the device surface can never be avoided. Here, we propose a new SPP excitation scheme based on a transparent gradient metasurface and numerically demonstrate that it exhibits inherently high efficiency (~94%) because the designed meta-coupler suppresses both decoupling and surface reflections. As a practical realization of this concept, we fabricated a meta-coupler for operation in the microwave regime and performed near-field and far-field experiments to demonstrate that the achieved excitation efficiency for spoof SPPs reaches ~73%, which is several times higher than that achieved by other available devices in this frequency domain. Our findings can motivate the design and fabrication of high-performance plasmonic devices to harvest light–matter interactions, particularly those related to spoof SPPs in the low-frequency domain. Nature Publishing Group 2016-01-01 /pmc/articles/PMC6059849/ /pubmed/30167110 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/lsa.2016.3 Text en Copyright © 2016 Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 Unported License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
spellingShingle Original Article
Sun, Wujiong
He, Qiong
Sun, Shulin
Zhou, Lei
High-efficiency surface plasmon meta-couplers: concept and microwave-regime realizations
title High-efficiency surface plasmon meta-couplers: concept and microwave-regime realizations
title_full High-efficiency surface plasmon meta-couplers: concept and microwave-regime realizations
title_fullStr High-efficiency surface plasmon meta-couplers: concept and microwave-regime realizations
title_full_unstemmed High-efficiency surface plasmon meta-couplers: concept and microwave-regime realizations
title_short High-efficiency surface plasmon meta-couplers: concept and microwave-regime realizations
title_sort high-efficiency surface plasmon meta-couplers: concept and microwave-regime realizations
topic Original Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6059849/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30167110
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/lsa.2016.3
work_keys_str_mv AT sunwujiong highefficiencysurfaceplasmonmetacouplersconceptandmicrowaveregimerealizations
AT heqiong highefficiencysurfaceplasmonmetacouplersconceptandmicrowaveregimerealizations
AT sunshulin highefficiencysurfaceplasmonmetacouplersconceptandmicrowaveregimerealizations
AT zhoulei highefficiencysurfaceplasmonmetacouplersconceptandmicrowaveregimerealizations