Controlling plasmonic orbital angular momentum by combining geometric and dynamic phases

Abstract

Tunable orbit angular momentum (OAM) of surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) is theoretically studied with appropriately designed metasurfaces. By controlling both the orientation angle and spatial position of nano aperture array on an ultrathin gold film, the field distributions of the surface waves can be engineered to contain both spin dependent and independent OAM components. Simultaneous control over the geometric phase and optical path difference induced phase (dynamic phase) provides extra degrees of freedom for manipulating OAM of SPPs. We show that arbitrary combination of OAM numbers can be realized for the SPPs excited by incident light of different circular polarizations. The results provides powerful control over the OAM of SPPs, which will have potential applications on optical trapping, imaging, communications and quantum information processing.