Polarization control with plasmonic antenna-tips: A universal approach for optical nano-crystallography and vector-field imaging

Abstract

Controlling the propagation and polarization vectors in linear and nonlinear optical spectroscopy enables to probe the anisotropy of optical responses providing structural symmetry selective contrast in optical imaging. Here we present a novel tilted antenna-tip approach to control the optical vector-field by breaking the axial symmetry of the nano-probe in tip-enhanced near-field microscopy. This gives rise to a localized plasmonic antenna effect with significantly enhanced optical field vectors with control of both \textit{in-plane} and \textit{out-of-plane} components. We use the resulting vector-field specificity in the symmetry selective nonlinear optical response of second-harmonic generation (SHG) for a generalized approach to optical nano-crystallography and -imaging. In tip-enhanced SHG imaging of monolayer MoS${}_2$ films and single-crystalline ferroelectric YMnO${}_3$, we reveal nano-crystallographic details of domain boundaries and domain topology with enhanced sensitivity and nanoscale spatial resolution. The approach is applicable to any anisotropic linear and nonlinear optical response, and provides for optical nano-crystallographic imaging of molecular or quantum materials.

References in corpus (6)

• Electrical Control of Second-Harmonic Generation in a WSe2 Monolayer Transistor
• Radiative control of dark excitons at room temperature by nano-optical antenna-tip induced Purcell effect
• Hybrid tip-enhanced nano-spectroscopy and -imaging of monolayer WSe2 with local strain control
• Phase Resolved Surface Plasmon Interferometry of Graphene
• Determination of electric field, magnetic field, and electric current distributions of infrared optical antennas: A nano-optical vector network analyzer
• Understanding the Plasmonics of Nanostructured Atomic Force Microscopy Tips

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Quantifying nanoscale electromagnetic fields in near-field microscopy by Fourier demodulation analysis
• Adaptive tip-enhanced nano-spectroscopy
• Mapping the near-field spin angular momenta in the structured surface plasmon polaritons field
• Diffraction-Unlimited Tip-Enhanced Sum-Frequency Vibrational Nanoscopy
• Giant near-field nonlinear electrophotonic effects in an angstrom-scale plasmonic junction