UC San Diego

Nanophotonics is finding myriad applications in information technology, health care, lighting and sensing. Plasmonics, as one of the most rapidly growing fields in nanophotonics, has great potential to revolutionize many applications in nanophotonics, including bio-sensing, imaging, lighting, photolithography and magnetic recording. In this dissertation, we explore the electrodynamics of plasmonic fields on different structured metallic chips and demonstrate how to manipulate light from nano to micro scale on the structure plasmonic chips. It is highly desired to excite and control propagation of surface plasmon polariton fields in a systematic fashion as it is possible with optical fields both in free space and dielectric waveguides. To accomplish this goal, we developed the design methodology compatible with the conventional Fourier optical devices, investigated on-chip plasmonic metamaterials with novel material response and functionalities, as well as constructed sophisticated chip-scale integration of different optical element. We begin by discussing the fundamentals of plasmonic fields and modal propagation properties. We next investigate a metallic metamaterial showing form-birefringence by engineering the inherent metal properties on nanoscale, and experimentally characterized their supported plasmonic index ellipsoids. We present novel experimental and analytic results of plasmonic nano metamaterials allowing excitation of plasmonic fields by transverse electric polarized incidence, complementing so far demonstrated transverse magnetic polarized excitation. We further construct a plasmonic photonic crystal to manipulate the propagating plasmonic field on a micro scale. On a lager sub- millimeter scale, we experimentally validated the feasibility of Fourier plasmonics, demonstrating possibilities of miniaturizing the conventional bulky optical devices on small plasmonic chips. We ultimately integrate various photonic components on different scales and provide an approach for efficiently using resonant plasmonic phenomena to achieve nanoscale optical field localization