Methodology of surface wave holography for wavefront shaping of light

Plasmonic nanostructures have offered a wide variety of opportunities to manipulate the properties of light and light-matter interactions. In this talk we discuss a novel methodology called surface wave holography, which allows for direct determination of the morphology of plasmonic nanostructrues perforated on a metal thin film for wavefront control and shaping of light without the need of complicated inverse-problem solutions. Wavefront shaping of microwave, infrared, and visible light have been successfully realized and demonstrated.

Plasmonic nanostructures built on a metallic surface have attracted much interest over years. When a subwavelength aperture is surrounded by periodic corrugations, the transmitted light can emerges as a beam with a small angular divergence, instead of diffracting in all directions. This finding has opened a path of manipulating wave front by designing periodic subwavlength structures. It is believed that the interaction between surface electromagnetic wave and subwavelength metallic structures plays a key role in the phenomenon. So far, an analytical tool that allows for easy conceptual understanding of the numerical or experimental results of metallic surface nanostructures is absent, and this becomes a big obstacle for expanding these structures to have more complicated functionalities.