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...

Enhanced terahertz emission from thin film semiconductor/metal interfaces

Terahertz light is electromagnetic radiation, similar to visible light. The photons that the terahertz light is comprised of carry a much smaller amount of energy compared to the visible light photons. Unlike visible light, terahertz light can pass through materials like plastic, cardboards, wood etc.; a very useful property which enables it to...

Surface plasmon-enhanced terahertz emission from a hemicyanine self-assembled monolayer

Emission of terahertz radiation is observed when surface plasmons are excited on a thin film of gold, in the Kretschmann geometry. When a hemicyanine-terminated alkanethiol self-assembled monolayer of thickness 1.2 nm is deposited on the gold film, stronger terahertz emission is observed. Our experimental results confirm that enhanced terahertz...

Fiber optic Surface Plasmon Resonance sensor based on wavelength modulation for hydrogen sensing

A new design of a fiber optic Surface Plasmon Resonance (SPR) sensor using Palladium as a sensitive layer for hydrogen detection is presented. In this approach, a transducer layer is deposited on the outside of a multimode fiber, after removing the optical cladding. The transducer layer is a multilayer stack made of a Silver, a Silica and a...

Percolation-enhanced generation of terahertz pulses by optical rectification on ultrathin gold films

Emission of pulses of electromagnetic radiation in the terahertz range is observed when ultrathin gold films on glass are illuminated with femtosecond near-IR laser pulses. A distinct maximum is observed in the emitted terahertz amplitude from films of average thickness just above the percolation threshold. Our measurements suggest that the...

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...

Toward the development of a Three-Dimensional Mid–Field Microscope

Recently, an extraordinary transmission of light through small holes (<200 nm) in a thin metallic film has been described. This phenomenon has been shown to be the result of the photon-plasmon interaction in thin films where a periodic structure (such as a set of holes) is embedded in the film. One of the extraordinary results is that the beam...