Regensburg 2013 – scientific programme
Parts | Days | Selection | Search | Updates | Downloads | Help
O: Fachverband Oberflächenphysik
O 19: Plasmonics and Nanooptics II
O 19.9: Talk
Monday, March 11, 2013, 18:00–18:15, H31
Adiabatic Nanofocusing on Ultrasmooth Single-Crystalline Gold Tapers Creates a 10-nm-Sized Light Source with Few-Cycle Time Resolution — •Slawa Schmidt1, Björn Piglosiewicz1, Diyar Sadiq1, Javid Shirdel1, Jae Sung Lee2, Parinda Vasa1, Namkyoo Park2, Dai-Sik Kim3, and Christoph Lienau1 — 1Institut für Physik, Carl von Ossietzky Universität, Oldenburg — 2Photonic Systems Laboratory, School of EECS, Seoul National University, Korea — 3Department of Physics and Astronomy, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea
We demonstrate adiabatic nanofocusing of few-cycle light pulses using ultrasharp and ultrasmooth single-crystalline gold tapers. We show that the grating-induced launching of spectrally broad-band surface plasmon polariton wavepackets onto the shaft of such a taper generates isolated, point-like light spots with 10 fs duration and 10 nm diameter spatial extent at its very apex. This nanofocusing is so efficient that nanolocalized electric fields inducing strong optical nonlinearities at the tip end are reached with conventional high repetition rate laser oscillators. We use here the resulting second harmonic to fully characterize the time structure of the localized electric field in frequency-resolved interferometric autocorrelation measurements. Our results strongly suggest that these nanometer-sized ultrafast light spots will enable new experiments probing the dynamics of optical excitations of individual metallic, semiconducting, and magnetic nanostructures.