Dynamic and static control of the optical phase of guided p-polarized light for near-field focusing at large angles of incidence

TL;DR

This paper explores both dynamic and static methods for controlling the optical phase of guided p-polarized light to achieve near-field focusing at large angles of incidence, using surface plasmons, surface curvature, and advanced computational techniques.

Contribution

It introduces novel dynamic and static control schemes for near-field light focusing, including field-induced transparency and surface curvature effects, with new computational approaches for near-surface field calculation.

Findings

Dynamic control via field-induced transparency modulates focused light intensity.

Surface curvature influences static near-field focusing and negative refraction patterns.

Suppression of anomalous refraction achieved through higher-order waveguide modes and reflection enhancement.

Abstract

Both dynamic and static approaches are proposed and investigated for controlling the optical phase of a p-polarized light wave that is guided through a surface-patterned metallic structure with subwavelength features. For dynamic control, field-induced transparency (FIT) from photo-excited electrons in a slit-embedded atomic system show up within a narrow frequency window for modulating the intensity of focused transmitted light in the near-field region. Based on the electromagnetic coupling, this is facilitated by surface plasmons between the two FIT-atom embedded slits. For static control, the role of surface curvature is obtained for focused transmitted light passing through a Gaussian-shaped metallic microlens embedded with a linear array of slits, in addition to a negative light-refraction pattern, which is associated with higher-diffraction modes of light, under a large angle of incidence in the near-field region. Most interesting, however, this anomalous negative light-refraction pattern becomes suppressible with leaked higher-order waveguide modes of light passing through a very thin film. At the same time, it is also suppressible with a reinforced reflection at the left foothill of a Gaussian-shaped slit array for the forward-propagating surface-plasmon wave at large angles of incidence. A prediction is given for near-field focusing of light with its sharpness dynamically controlled by the frequency of the light in a very narrow window. Moreover, a different scheme based on Green's second integral identity is proposed for overcoming a difficulty in calculating the near-field distribution very close to a surface by means of a finite-difference-time-domain method.