Curved light to enable ultra fast optical switching

The researchers believe the development will pave the way for ultra fast, ultra compact communication systems and optoelectronic devices, and could also stimulate revolutions in chemistry, biology and medicine. The key to the success of the work, according to lead researcher Xiang Zhang, was the team's ability to directly couple free space Airy beams to quasi particles called surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs). By directly coupling Airy beams to these SPPs, the researchers were able to manipulate light at an extremely small scale beyond the diffraction limit. "Dynamic controllability of SPPs is extremely desirable for reconfigurable optical interconnections," said Zhang. "We have provided a novel approach of plasmonic Airy beam to manipulate SPPs without the need of any waveguide structures over metallic surfaces, providing dynamic control of their ballistic trajectories despite any surface roughness and defects, or even getting around obstacles. Zhang believes this is promising not only for applications in reconfigurable optical interconnections, but also for precisely manipulating particles on extremely small scales. He maintained that up until now, different plasmonic elements for manipulating surface plasmons were realised either through structuring metal surfaces or by placing dielectric structures on metals. "Both of these approaches are based on the fabrication of permanent nanostructures on the metal surface, which are very difficult if not impossible to reconfigure in real time," he noted. "Reconfigurability is crucial to optical interconnections, which in turn are crucial for high performance optical computing and communication systems. The reconfigurability of our technique is a huge advantage over previous approaches."