No Arabic abstract
Vortex-carrying matter waves, such as chiral electron beams, are of significant interest in both applied and fundamental science. Continuous wave electron vortex beams are commonly prepared via passive phase masks imprinting a transverse phase modulation on the electrons wave function. Here, we show that femtosecond chiral plasmonic near fields enable the generation and dynamic control on the ultrafast timescale of an electron vortex beam. The vortex structure of the resulting electron wavepacket is probed in both real and reciprocal space using ultrafast transmission electron microscopy. This method offers a high degree of scalability to small length scales and a highly efficient manipulation of the electron vorticity with attosecond precision. Besides the direct implications in the investigation of nanoscale ultrafast processes in which chirality plays a major role, we further discuss the perspectives of using this technique to shape the wave function of charged composite particles, such as protons, and how it can be used to probe their internal structure.
Topological photonics has revolutionized our understanding of light propagation, but most of current studies are focused on designing a static photonic structure. Developing a dynamic photonic topological platform to switch multiple topological functionalities at ultrafast speed is still a great challenge. Here we demonstrate an ultrafast reprogrammable plasmonic topological insulator, where the topological propagation route can be dynamically steered at nanosecond-level switching time, namely more than 10^7 times faster than the current state-of-the-art. This orders-of-magnitude improvement is achieved by using ultrafast electronic switches in an innovative way to implement the programmability. Due to the flexible programmability, many existing photonic topological functionalities can be integrated into this agile topological platform. Our work brings the current studies of photonic topological insulators to a digital and intelligent era, which could boost the development of intelligent and ultrafast photoelectric devices with built-in topological protection.
Efficient frequency conversion techniques are crucial to the development of plasmonic metasurfaces for information processing and signal modulation. In principle, nanoscale electric-field confinement in nonlinear materials enables higher harmonic conversion efficiencies per unit volume than those attainable in bulk materials. Here we demonstrate efficient second-harmonic generation (SHG) in a serrated nanogap plasmonic geometry that generates steep electric field gradients on a dielectric metasurface. An ultrafast pump is used to control plasmon-induced electric fields in a thin-film material with inversion symmetry that, without plasmonic enhancement, does not exhibit an an even-order nonlinear optical response. The temporal evolution of the plasmonic near-field is characterized with ~100as resolution using a novel nonlinear interferometric technique. The ability to manipulate nonlinear signals in a metamaterial geometry as demonstrated here is indispensable both to understanding the ultrafast nonlinear response of nanoscale materials, and to producing active, optically reconfigurable plasmonic devices
A new method to generate and control the amplitude and phase distributions of a optical vortex beam is proposed. By introducing a holographic grating on top of the dielectric waveguide, the free space vortex beam and the in-plane guiding wave can be converted to each other. This microscale holographic grating is very robust against the variation of geometry parameters. The designed vortex beam generator can produce the target beam with a fidelity up to 0.93, and the working bandwidth is about 175 nm with the fidelity larger than 0.80. In addition, a multiple generator composed of two holographic gratings on two parallel waveguides are studied, which can perform an effective and flexible modulation on the vortex beam by controlling the phase of the input light. Our work opens a new avenue towards the integrated OAM devices with multiple degrees of optical freedom, which can be used for optical tweezers, micronano imaging, information processing, and so on.
We theoretically and experimentally studied a novel class of vortex beams named open vortex beams (OVBs). Such beams are generated using Gaussian beams diffracted by partially blocked fork-shaped gratings (PB-FSGs).The analytical model of OVBs in the near field and far field is given by superpositions of Hypergeometric (HyG) modes. Unlike conventional integer and fractional vortex beams, the OVBs can have both an open ring structure and an integer topological charge (TC). The TC is decided by the circumference covered by the open ring. It is also quantitatively shown that a $pi/2$ rotation of the open ring occurs in the propagation of an OVB due to the Gouy phase shift. Futhermore, we demonstrate experimental generation and detection of OVBs. Our experimental results are in very good agreement with the theory. We believe that the OVB can be the potential candidate for numerous applications, such as particle manipulation, quantum information and optical metrology.
In this article, a chiral plasmonic hydrogen-sensing platform using palladium-based nanohelices is demonstrated. Such 3D chiral nanostructures fabricated by nanoglancing angle deposition exhibit strong circular dichroism both experimentally and theoretically. The chiroptical properties of the palladium nanohelices are altered upon hydrogen uptake and sensitively depend on the hydrogen concentration. Such properties are well suited for remote and spark-free hydrogen sensing in the flammable range. Hysteresis is reduced, when an increasing amount of gold is utilized in the palladium-gold hybrid helices. As a result, the linearity of the circular dichroism in response to hydrogen is significantly improved. The chiral plasmonic sensor scheme is of potential interest for hydrogen-sensing applications, where good linearity and high sensitivity are required.