Dr. Jan Renger

  • Senior Scientist
  • Room: A.3.232
  • Telephone: +49 9131 7133341
  • E-mail

Tailoring the optical properties at the micro- and nanoscale is key to enable new experiments in the field of quantum optics and biophotonics. To this end, I use my strong background in numerical simulations as well as nano- and microfabrication techniques together with the expertise in spectroscopy, linear and nonlinear optics to enable and conduct experiments.

2009

Free-Space Excitation of Propagating Surface Plasmon Polaritons by Nonlinear Four-Wave Mixing

Jan Renger, Romain Quidant, Niek van Hulst, Stefano Palomba, Lukas Novotny

Physical Review Letters 103 266802 (2009) | Journal

A unique feature of surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) is that their in-plane momentum is larger than the momentum of free-propagating photons of the same energy. Therefore, it is believed that they can be excited only by evanescent fields created by total internal reflection or by local scattering. Here, we provide the first demonstration of free-space excitation of surface plasmons by means of nonlinear four-wave mixing. The process involves the vectorial addition of the momenta of three incident photons, making it possible to penetrate the light cone and directly couple to the SPP dispersion curve. Using this technique, surface plasmons can be launched on any metal surface by simply overlapping two beams of laser pulses incident from resonant directions. The excitation scheme is also applicable to other bound modes, such as waveguide modes, surface phonon polaritons, and excitations of 2D electron gases.


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