Abstract

Renewed and growing interest in the field of surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) comes from a rapid advance of nanostructuring technologies. The desired nanostructures are usually fabricated by electron- or ion-beam lithography. An alternative approach is the application of two-photon polymerization (2PP) [1] or nonlinear lithography. Both these technologies are based on nonlinear absorption of near-infrared femtosecond laser pulses. In this contribution, we study applications of advanced femtosecond laser technologies for the fabrication of SPP structures. We demonstrate that resulting structures can be used for excitation, guiding, and manipulation of SPPs on a subwavelength scale [2]. Characterization of these structures is performed by detection of the plasmon leakage radiation. 2PP allows the fabrication of dielectric waveguides, splitters, and couplers directly on metal surfaces (see Fig. 1).

© 2007 IEEE