Wave front adaptation using a deformable mirror for adiabatic nanofocusing along an ultrasharp gold taper.

We describe and demonstrate the use of an adaptive wave front optimization scheme for enhancing the efficiency of adiabatic nanofocusing of surface plasmon polariton (SPP) waves along an ultrasharp conical gold taper. Adiabatic nanofocusing is an emerging and promising scheme for controlled focusing of far field light into nanometric volumes. It comprises three essential steps: SPP excitation by coupling far field light to an SPP waveguide, SPP propagation along the waveguide and adiabatic SPP nanofocusing towards a geometric singularity. For commonly used complex waveguide geometries, such as, e.g., conical metal tapers, a realistic modeling and efficiency optimization is challenging. Here, we use a deformable mirror to adaptively control the wave front of the incident far field light. We demonstrate an eight-fold enhancement in nanofocusing efficiency and analyze the shape of the resulting optimized wave front. The introduced wave front optimization scheme is of general interest for guiding and controlling light on the nanoscale.

Strong field acceleration and steering of ultrafast electron pulses from a sharp metallic nanotip.

We report a strong, laser-field induced modification of the propagation direction of ultrashort electron pulses emitted from nanometer-sized gold tapers. Angle-resolved kinetic energy spectra of electrons emitted from such tips are recorded using ultrafast near-infrared light pulses of variable wavelength and intensity for excitation. For sufficiently long wavelengths, we observe a pronounced strong-field acceleration of electrons within the field gradient at the taper apex. We find a distinct narrowing of the emission cone angle of the fastest electrons. We ascribe this to the field-induced steering of subcycle electrons as opposed to the diverging emission of quiver electrons. Our findings are corroborated by simulations based on a modified Simpleman model incorporating the curved, vectorial field gradient in the vicinity of the tip. Our results indicate new pathways for designing highly directional nanometer-sized ultrafast electron sources.

Adiabatic nanofocusing on ultrasmooth single-crystalline gold tapers creates a 10-nm-sized light source with few-cycle time resolution.

We demonstrate adiabatic nanofocusing of few-cycle light pulses using ultrasharp and ultrasmooth single-crystalline gold tapers. We show that the grating-induced launching of spectrally broad-band surface plasmon polariton wavepackets onto the shaft of such a taper generates isolated, point-like light spots with 10 fs duration and 10 nm diameter spatial extent at its very apex. This nanofocusing is so efficient that nanolocalized electric fields inducing strong optical nonlinearities at the tip end are reached with conventional high repetition rate laser oscillators. We use here the resulting second harmonic to fully characterize the time structure of the localized electric field in frequency-resolved interferometric autocorrelation measurements. Our results strongly suggest that these nanometer-sized ultrafast light spots will enable new experiments probing the dynamics of optical excitations of individual metallic, semiconducting, and magnetic nanostructures.