Scattering free Plasmonic Optics

Potential applications of surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) range from bio-sensing to imaging, sub-wavelength light guiding, and on-chip communications. These applications are ultimately unified in the paradigm of surface optics - where surface waves - rather than plane waves-- are used for on-chip optical communications between nm-sized ports. While a number of surface optical elements including waveguides, lenses, and reflectors have been already designed, the performance of the majority of these devices is fundamentally flawed by the parasitic scattering of SPPs from the boundaries between optical elements with different refractive indices. The talk will provide some background on the current state of plasmonics and present an approach to eliminate the parasitic scattering of SPPs with anisotropic metamaterials. The concept of truly 2D optics will be illustrated on examples of plasmonic refractor and plasmonic Bragg reflector. The limitations of the developed technique will be discussed.