Observation of the Wannier-Stark ladder in plasmonic waveguide arrays

Abstract

Evanescently coupled waveguides are a powerful platform to study and visualize the wave dynamics in tight-binding systems. Here, we investigate the propagation of surface plasmon polaritons in arrays of dielectric loaded surface plasmon polariton waveguides with a propagation constant gradient acting as an effective external potential. Using leakage radiation microscopy, we observe in real-space for single site excitation a periodic breathing of the wavepacket and an oscillatory motion in the case of Gaussian excitation of multiple waveguides. The corresponding momentum resolved spectra are composed of sets of equally spaced modes. We interpret these observation as the plasmonic analogues of Bloch oscillations and the Wannier-Stark ladder, respectively.

arXiv comment5 pages, 4 figures

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• Observation and uses of position-space Bloch oscillations in an ultracold gas
• Symmetric Bloch oscillations of matter waves
• Observation of Bloch Oscillations and Wannier-Stark Localization on a Superconducting Processor
• Spatial Bloch oscillations of a quantum gas in a "beat-note" superlattice
• Transverse Anderson localization of surface plasmon polaritons
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Cited by in corpus (2)

• Chaotic Bloch oscillations in dissipative optical systems driven by a periodic train of coherent pulses
• Controlled Quantized Adiabatic Transport in a superlattice Wannier-Stark ladder