Ultrashort self-induced transparency plasmon solitons

TL;DR

This paper investigates ultrashort plasmon solitons in gold films, demonstrating self-induced transparency enabled by Kerr nonlinearity, which compensates dispersion and mitigates dephasing effects.

Contribution

It introduces a model combining nonlinear Schrödinger and Bloch equations to predict ultrashort plasmon solitons with self-induced transparency in gold films.

Findings

Predicted plasmon solitons with pulse durations below 10 fs.

Showed Kerr nonlinearity can compensate group velocity dispersion.

Demonstrated reduction of dephasing effects via self-induced transmission.

Abstract

We study the interband self-induced transmission of surface plasmon polaritons in a gold film surrounded by an external Kerr medium. We model the optical propagation by using a version of the generalized nonlinear Schrodinger equation for the field envelope coupled to Bloch equations for valence electrons of gold, predicting self-induced transparency of ultrashort plasmon solitons with a pulse duration below 10 fs. We demonstrate that the Kerr nonlinearity from the surrounding dielectric can be used to compensate for the group velocity dispersion, and that the impact of dephasing and decay processes can be effectively reduced by the self-induced transmission mechanism.