Hybrid Airy Plasmons with Dynamically Steerable Trajectories

TL;DR

This paper introduces hybrid Airy plasmons in a graphene-based waveguide that exhibit long propagation lengths, effective transverse deflections, and dynamically steerable trajectories via chemical potential adjustments, enabling advanced applications in micro-object manipulation.

Contribution

It demonstrates the first realization of hybrid Airy plasmons with tunable trajectories in a graphene-based THz waveguide, overcoming previous limitations of loss and steerability.

Findings

Hybrid Airy plasmons have large propagation lengths.

Their trajectories can be dynamically steered by changing graphene's chemical potential.

They exhibit effective transverse deflections and moderate quality factors.

Abstract

With the intriguing properties of diffraction-free, self-accelerating, and self-healing, Airy plasmons are promising to be used in the trapping, transporting, and sorting of micro-objects, imaging, and chip scale signal processing. However, the high dissipative loss and the lack of dynamical steerability restrict the implementation of Airy plasmons in these applications. Here we reveal the hybrid Airy plasmons for the first time by taking a hybrid graphene-based plasmonic waveguide in the terahertz (THz) domain as an example. Due to the coupling between an optical mode and a plasmonic mode, the hybrid Airy plasmons can have large propagation lengths and effective transverse deflections, where the transverse waveguide confinements are governed by the hybrid modes with moderate quality factors. Meanwhile, the propagation trajectories of hybrid Airy plasmons are dynamically steerable by changing the chemical potential of graphene. These hybrid Airy plasmons may promote the further discovery of non-diffracting beams with the emerging developments of optical tweezers and tractor beams.