Double-Slit and Square-Slit Interferences With Surface Plasmon Polaritons Modulated by Orbital Angular Momentum Beams

Abstract

We present two kinds of interferences on metallic thin films with orbital angular momentum (OAM) beams, namely double-slit interference and square-slit interference. When an OAM beam is normally incident upon the metallic thin film with two slits, the fringes on the metallic thin film generated by the interference of two surface plasmon polariton (SPP) waves will twist, and the twist amount depends on the topological charge of the incoming OAM beam. When a square-slit is employed, a quasi-square optical lattice will be unveiled and the arrangement of lattice can be modulated by the OAM beam. The fringes and spots are both subwavelength level, which show great potential for super-resolution microscopy, OAM detection and spot array generation.

Retrieving orbital angular momentum distribution of light with plasmonic vortex lens

“…It has attracted lots of research interests because of its intriguing properties such as field localization and enhancement. The SPPs have been widely used in a variety of interesting applications, such as plasmon focusing 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 , directional plasmon coupling 11 12 and so on. Plasmonic vortex lens (PVL), which enables to couple the input light to SPPs in the form of plasmonic vortex, is one of the most representative branches of SPPs.…”

“…These features make the PVL can be applied in nanofocusing 13 14 15 and circular polarization analyzer 16 17 18 19 20 21 . In addition, the PVL can couple the orbital angular momentum (OAM) into the form of various Bessel functions 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 and it was employed to measure the OAM of light 7 . Light beams carrying OAM are associated with an azimuthal phase structure , where φ is the angular coordinate and l is the azimuthal index, defining the topological charge (TC) of the OAM beams 23 .…”