Polarization‐to‐Phase Coupling at a Structured Surface for Plasmonic Structured Illumination Microscopy

Abstract

Polarization–phase interaction on the nanoscale is the cause of many unique effects that are absent or weak in traditional optics. These effects enable various applications in physics, nano‐optics, and material science. Here, by making use of a properly designed metasurface, polarization‐to‐phase coupling in a structured surface is investigated. The wavefront of a surface plasmon polariton (SPP), emitted from the metasurface, can be tuned continuously and linearly by changing the incident polarization along the longitudinal line at the Poincaré sphere. This type of phase modulation with polarization enables dynamic control of the wavefront. This is very different from other methods that achieve phase modulation through nano‐structures, which offer little room for tuning after the structure has been completed. As a demonstration of application, a plasmonic structured illumination microscope is achieved, where the near‐field standing‐wave of the SPP is controlled dynamically through the incident polarization. This improves both reliability and stability substantially. Metasurfaces are powerful tools to modulate the wavefront of an electromagnetic field. In combination with structured illumination microscopy (SIM) (the “Meta‐SIM”), this allows more degrees of freedom and should accelerate the progress of SIM technology.

Nearly Perfect Routing of Chiral Light by Plasmonic Grating on Slab Waveguide

“…[31][32][33] Notably, some of the most advanced and functional grating coupler designs are widely applied for excitation and manipulation of the surface plasmons. For example, there have been numerous studies on the photonic spin-orbit coupling effect in slitbased gratings for directional coupling of surface plasmons, [34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46] angular orbital momentum splitting, [25] guided mode wavefront manipulation (near-field focusing), [47][48][49] and polarimetry. [43,50] The mentioned effect of photonic spin-orbit coupling that is also utilized in our study is actively employed not only for surface plasmons routing, but for light manipulation in many other optical structures as well.…”

“…For example, there have been numerous studies on the photonic spin-orbit coupling effect in slitbased gratings for directional coupling of surface plasmons, [34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46] angular orbital momentum splitting, [25] guided mode wavefront manipulation (near-field focusing), [47][48][49] and polarimetry. [43,50] The mentioned effect of photonic spin-orbit coupling that is also utilized in our study is actively employed not only for surface plasmons routing, but for light manipulation in many other optical structures as well. In particular, selectivity by the light handedness was demonstrated for scattering by individual nanoparticles, [51] directional emission in metamaterials, [52] photonic crystal modes routing, [53] directional Raman scattering, [54] handedness-controlled waveguide splitters.…”

Electro-Optic Modulation of Higher-Order Poincaré Beam Based on Nonlinear Optical Crystal

“…Compared with scalar beams, vector beams (VBs) with spatially inhomogeneous polarization states distribution have many novel properties [1,2]. This makes VBs were researched and applied in many fields, such as super-resolution imaging [3,4], focus engineering [5,6], particle trapping and manipulations [7,8], laser materials processing [9], data storage [10], optical communication [11]. Driven by the application prospects in these fields, many methods have been proposed to generate VBs, especially higher-order Poincaré (HOP) beams.…”

Plasmonic grating for circularly-polarized out-coupling of waveguide-enhanced spontaneous emission

“…This study was followed up by a number of applications of similar structures for the so-called photonic spin-orbit coupling [55,56]. Most of them were also based on surface plasmons [26,[57][58][59][60][61][62][63][64][65][66][67][68][69][70][71], although the same principle is valid for dielectric waveguides as well [72,73]. Remarkably, the dielectric structures schemes attracted much less attention in this context, although they are much more widely spear in practice.…”