Deep-Subwavelength Optical Spin Textures in Volume Plasmon Polaritons with Hyperbolic Metamaterials

摘要

Hyperbolic metamaterials can support extremely high-k wavevectors, alsoknown as volume plasmon polaritons, with highly directional propagationand light confinement to deep-subwavelength scales. The number of high-kmodes has an inverse relationship with the overall thickness of hyperbolicmetamaterials. Here, the optical spin textures from high-k mode polaritonson the surface of silica–silver multilayer hyperbolic metamaterials are studied.The results demonstrate that with an increase in the overall thickness, thespin texture changes from a twisted structure to a Néel-type photonic skyrmion,due to the decrease in the number of high-k modes. Moreover, the sizeof a single photonic skyrmion is less than 1/2 of the light wavelength, and thefull width at half maximum of the spin angular momentum is less than 1/9 ofthe light wavelength. This work is expected to facilitate new applications ofhyperbolic metamaterials, such as spin-dependent excitation and detectiondevices at the deep-subwavelength level.