Efficient Excitation of Channel Plasmons in Tailored, UV-Lithography-Defined V-Grooves

[Image: see text] We demonstrate the highly efficient (>50%) conversion of freely propagating light to channel plasmon-polaritons (CPPs) in gold V-groove waveguides using compact 1.6 μm long waveguide-termination coupling mirrors. Our straightforward fabrication process, involving UV-lithography and crystallographic silicon etching, forms the coupling mirrors innately and ensures exceptional-quality, wafer-scale device production. We tailor the V-shaped profiles by thermal silicon oxidation in order to shift initially wedge-located modes downward into the V-grooves, resulting in well-confined CPPs suitable for nanophotonic applications

Plasmonic nanocircuitry with embedded subwavelength waveguides and Yagi-style antennas

High confinement in plasmonic waveguides usually comes along with high loss. We present experiments on a new approach, which allows to tune adiabatically between high confinement and low loss waveguides, connected to optical Yagi-style antennas. (c) 2008 Optical Society of Americ

Probing guided modes in a monolayer colloidal crystal on a flat metal film

Two-dimensional slab hybrid metal-dielectric photonic crystals, which are prepared by assembling polymer colloidal spheres into closely packed monolayers of hexagonal symmetry on a gold-coated glass substrate, show an improved confinement of light compared with a colloidal monolayer on a glass substrate. We demonstrated that the optical response of such hybrid crystals consists of diffractively coupled waveguiding modes, Fabry-Perot resonances, and Mie resonances. Correspondingly, two major mechanisms, namely, band transport and hopping of localized excitations, participate in the in-plane light transport in such hybrid crystals