Berlin 2015 – scientific programme
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O: Fachverband Oberflächenphysik
O 84: Focus Session: Structural Dynamics in Nanoscale Materials Probed by Ultrashort Electron Pulses
O 84.3: Talk
Thursday, March 19, 2015, 15:45–16:00, MA 005
Simultaneous observation of quantization and interference of a surface plasmon polariton by PINEM — •Yoshie Murooka1, Tom Lummen1, Luca Piazza1, Erik Quiñonez2, Bryan Reed3, Brett Barwick2, and Fabrizio Carbone1 — 1École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland — 2Trinity College, Hartford, CT 06106, USA — 3Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, CA 94551, USA
For applications in photonics and optical data storage, surface plasmon polariton (SPP) is intensively studied because of its high spatial confinement and precise optical control with, for example, its quantum properties. SPP can be photo-generated on a metal surface as a propagating electromagnetic wave, while the vertical confinement is in the sub-wavelength regime. Lately, such SPP fields have been studied in terms of their wave-particle duality. Here, using recently developed Photo-induced near field electron microscopy (PINEM), we have imaged both the quantization and the interference of the confined fields simultaneously on an isolated metal nanowire. PINEM was realized on femtosecond-TEM equipped with an electron energy analyzer. The SPP field was induced by pulsed laser, and probed by electron pulses that were spatio-temporally overlapped with the light. The exchange of energy between the field and the electrons was found to be quantized, and the spatial distribution of the field was synchronously revealed as its interference pattern. This methodology enables to visualize and control SPP fields at nanoscale, and provides a novel tool to understand the fundamental properties of confined electromagnetic fields.