Recently, the Terahertz “Photonics research team at the School of Precision Instrument and Opto-Electronics Engineering” at the Tianjin University achieved significant progress in the study of "Asymmetric Excitation of surface plasmons”. The article “Asymmetric Excitation of surface plasmons by dark mode coupling” was published in the latest issue of the “Science Advances”. (Link: http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/2/e1501142.full).
"Science Advances” is a peer-reviewed multidisciplinary, open-access scientific journal established in early 2015. It is the first open-access journal published by the “American Association for the Advancement of Science”, published by “Science Advances”. In order to advance science for the benefit of all mankind “Science Advances” contributes to that mission by communicating the very best research across the full range of scientific fields to an extremely broad international audience.
Control over surface Plasmons (SPs) is essential in a variety of cutting-edge applications, such as highly integrated photonic signal processing systems, deep-sub wavelength lasing, high-resolution imaging, and ultrasensitive biomedical detection. Recently, asymmetric excitation of SPs has attracted enormous interest. In free space, the analog of electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) in metamaterials has been widely investigated to uniquely manipulate the electromagnetic waves. The research team includes, the Ph.D. candidates Zhang Jiaqian and Xu Quan who are working under, Professor Han Jiaguang and Professor Zhang Weili, to show that the dark mode coupling mechanism of the classical EIT effect enables an exotic and straightforward excitation of SPs in a met surface system.
This leads to not only resonant excitation of asymmetric SPs but also controllable exotic SP focused by the use of the Huygens-Fresnel principle. The experimental findings manifest the potential of developing plasmonic met devices with unique functionalities.
The research team focused on Terahertz Photonics and its functional devices, their research details were published in international famous academic journals such as “Nature Communications” and “Advanced Materials and Physical Review Letters”. The article “Active graphene-silicon hybrid diode for terahertz waves” which published in ‘’Nature Communications’ was recently selected as “The 2015 optics significance achievement in China”.
The new mechanism will lay the foundation for the future development of plasma spraying laser re-melting technology and play a significant role in the research of Terahertz Tablets. The University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom, the Northeastern University in the United States, and the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia participated in the research, also this research is supported at several major projects and institutions in across China.
