Surface plasmons (SPs) are electromagnetic surface waves that propagate at the interface between a conductor and a dielectric. Due to their unique ability to concentrate light on two-dimensional platforms and produce very high local-field intensity, SPs have rapidly fueled a variety of fundamental advances and practical applications. In parallel, the development of metamaterials and metasurfaces has rapidly revolutionized the design concepts of traditional optical devices, fostering the exciting field of meta-optics. This review focuses on recent progress of meta-optics inspired SP devices, which are implemented by the careful design of subwavelength structures and the arrangement of their spatial distributions. Devices of general interest, including coupling devices, on-chip tailoring devices, and decoupling devices, as well as nascent SP applications empowered by sophisticated usage of meta-optics, are introduced and discussed.

Plasmonic vortices confining orbital angular momentums to surface have aroused wide research interest in the last decade. Recent advances of near-field microscopes have enabled the study on the spatiotemporal dynamics of plasmonic vortices, providing a better understanding of optical orbital angular momentums in the evanescent wave regime. However, these works only focused on the objective characterization of plasmonic vortex and have not achieved subjectively tailoring of its spatiotemporal dynamics for specific applications. Herein, it is demonstrated that the plasmonic vortices with the same topological charge can be endowed with distinct spatiotemporal dynamics by simply changing the coupler design. Based on a near-field scanning terahertz microscopy, the surface plasmon fields are directly obtained with ultrahigh spatiotemporal resolution, experimentally exhibiting the generation and evolution divergences during the whole lifetime of plasmonic vortices. The proposed strategy is straightforward and universal, which can be readily applied into visible or infrared frequencies, facilitating the development of plasmonic vortex related researches and applications.

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Background. Cerebral infarction (CI) is a common brain disease in clinical practice, which is mainly due to the pathological environment of ischemia and hypoxia caused by difficult cerebral circulation perfusion function, resulting in ischemic necrosis of local brain tissue and neurological impairment. In traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) theory, CI is mainly due to blood stasis in the brain. Therefore, blood-activating and stasis-dissipating drugs are often used to treat CI in clinical practice. Salvia miltiorrhiza Bunge (SMB) is a kind of traditional Chinese medicine with good efficacy in promoting blood circulation and removing blood stasis, and treatment of CI with it is a feasible strategy. Based on the above analysis, we chose network pharmacology to investigate the feasibility of SMB in the treatment of CI and to study the possible molecular mechanisms by providing some reference for the treatment of CI with TCM. Methods. The active ingredients and related targets of SMB were obtained through the Traditional Chinese Medicine Systems Pharmacology (TCMSP) database, and CI-related targets were obtained from the GeneCards and DisGeNET databases. The target of SMB for the treatment of CI was obtained using Cytoscape software and visualized. GO and KEGG enrichment analysis was performed based on “clusterProfiler” within R, and the prediction results were validated by molecular docking technique. Results. By constructing a compound-target (C-T) network, it was found that the active components in SMB mainly treated CI by regulating key proteins such as AKT1, IL-6, and EGFR. These key proteins mainly involve in pathways such as immune regulation, cancer and lipid metabolism, such as lipid and atherosclerosis, chemical carcinogenesis-receptor activation pathways, and IL-17 signaling pathway. In the GO term, it mainly regulates the response to steroid hormones, membrane rafts, and G protein-amine receptor coupled activity. Eventually, we verified that the luteolin and tanshinone IIA components in SMB have a good possibility of action with AKT1 and IL-6 by in silico techniques, indicating that SMB has some scientificity in the treatment of CI. Conclusion. SMB mainly treats CI by regulating 94 proteins involved in lipid and atherosclerosis, chemical carcinogenesis-receptor activation, and IL-17 signaling pathway. Our research strategy provided a template for the drug development of TCM for the treatment of CI.