Nanoplasmonic near-field synthesis

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how pulse shaping and optimal control can synthesize plasmon-enhanced near-fields in nanoplasmonic structures, enabling single-cycle driven nonlinear phenomena like attosecond pulse generation.

Contribution

It introduces a method to synthesize near-fields in nanoplasmonic structures using pulse shaping and optimal control, even without prior knowledge of the structure's response.

Findings

Pulse shaping enables single-cycle driven nonlinear phenomena.

Optimal control techniques work without prior knowledge of plasmonic response.

Successful demonstration of attosecond pulse generation via plasmon-enhanced high harmonic generation.

Abstract

The temporal response of resonances in nanoplasmonic structures typically converts an incoming few-cycle field into a much longer near-field at the spot where non-linear physical phenomena including electron emission, recollision and high-harmonic generation can take place. We show that for practically useful structures pulse shaping of the incoming pulse can be used to synthesize the plasmon-enhanced field and enable single-cycle driven nonlinear physical phenomena. Our method is demonstrated for the generation of an isolated attosecond pulse by plasmon-enhanced high harmonic generation. We furthermore show that optimal control techniques can be used even if the response of the plasmonic structure is not known a priori.