Tailored hotspots from Airy-based surface plasmon polaritons

Abstract

Surface plasmons have attracted growing interest from the photonics community due to their inherent ability to controllably confine light below the diffraction limit and their direct application in trapping and transporting matter at the nanoscale. This method, known as plasmonic tweezers, employs confined fields generated by either localized plasmons or surface plasmon polaritons (SPP), which originate in the vicinity of nanostructure-based traps or across structureless platforms, respectively. Herein, we present a theoretical method for generating intense light hotspots and engineering their features by overlapping Airy SPPs (ASPP) at a smooth dielectric-metal interface. We coherently add pairs of Hermite-Gauss modes that belong to a complete basis set of finite-energy ASPPs, which yield highly confined plasmonic hotspots (approximate to lambda/10) without the need of using any nanostructured platform. Mode order and relative spacing parameters can be used to tailor the intensity and size of said hotspots, largely outperforming their Gaussian-only-based counterparts. Our method opens a promising venue to confine light at the nanoscale using ASPP-based structured light, which helps to advance the development of structureless plasmonic tweezers and holds promising potential for its application in optical signal processing and plasmonic circuitry.