Hybrid Airy Plasmons with Dynamically Steerable Trajectories

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.

This paper has been accepted by Nanoscale

References in corpus (8)

• Dyadic Green's Functions and Guided Surface Waves for a Surface Conductivity Model of Graphene
• Plasmonics in graphene at infra-red frequencies
• Manipulating infrared photons using plasmons in transparent graphene superlattices
• Self accelerating electron Airy beams
• Generation and near-field imaging of Airy surface plasmons
• Plasmonic Airy Beam on Metal Surface
• High performance solar cells based on graphene-GaAs heterostructures
• Analysis of surface plasmon excitation at terahertz frequencies with highly-doped graphene sheets via attenuated total reflection