Laser-launched evanescent surface plasmon polariton field utilized as a direct coherent pumping source to generate emitted nonlinear four-wave mixing radiation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel method using laser-launched evanescent surface plasmon polaritons as a coherent pump for four-wave mixing at dielectric/metal interfaces, promising enhanced efficiency for nanophotonics applications.

Contribution

It presents a new approach to enhance four-wave mixing efficiency by utilizing evanescent SPP fields as a coherent pump at dielectric/metal interfaces.

Findings

Numerical simulations confirm feasibility at air/gold and graphene/gold interfaces.

Local-field enhancement significantly boosts 4WM conversion efficiency.

Potential applications in nanophotonics and active plasmonics are identified.

Abstract

We develop a concept of surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) based four-wave mixing (4WM), in which a laser-launched evanescent SPP field is utilized as a coherent pumping source to involve directly in a nonlinear 4WM process at the dielectric/metal interface. Conversion efficiency of the resulting 4WM radiation is expected to be dramatically increased due to the local-field enhancement effect. Feasibility of implementing this concept at the air/gold film and graphene flake/gold film interfaces is further examined by numerical simulations. The concept shows intriguing promise for applications in newly emerging nanophotonics, optoelectronics, and active plasmonics.