Digitally adressable focusing of light into a subwavelength hot-spot

Abstract

We show that a plasmonic metamaterial can act as a far-field to near-field transformer that focuses a free-space beam of light into a subwavelength energy hot spot at a prescribed location with a spot size only a small fraction of the wavelength. The hot spot position on the metamaterial can be prescribed and moved at will from one metamolecule of the array to another in a "digital" fashion simply by modulating the input phase profile, thus providing new opportunities for imaging and optical data processing.

Nano Letters (2012) Vol.12(6) pp.2728-2731

doi: 10.1021/nl2043437

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