Top-down fabrication of plasmonic nanostructures for deterministic coupling to single quantum emitters

Metal nanostructures can be used to harvest and guide the emission of single photon emitters on-chip via surface plasmon polaritons. In order to develop and characterize photonic devices based on emitter-plasmon hybrid structures, a deterministic and scalable fabrication method for such structures is desirable. Here, we demonstrate deterministic...

A subwavelength slit as a quarter-wave retarder

We have experimentally studied the polarization-dependent transmission properties of a nanoslit in a gold film as a function of its width. The slit exhibits strong birefringence and dichroism. We find, surprisingly, that the transmission of the polarization parallel to the slit only disappears when the slit is much narrower than half a...

Bouncing surface plasmons

Employing an interferometric cavity ring-down technique we study the launching, propagation and reflection of surface plasmons on a smooth gold-air interface that is intersected by two parallel, subwavelength wide slits. Inside the low-finesse optical cavity defined by these slits the surface plasmon is observed to make multiple bounces. Our...

Polarization tomography of metallic nanohole arrays

We report polarization tomography experiments on metallic nanohole arrays with square and hexagonal symmetry. As a main result we find that a fully polarized input beam is partly depolarized after transmission through a nanohole array. This loss of polarization coherence is found to be anisotropic; i.e., it depends on the polarization state of...