Self-deflecting plasmonic lattice solitons and surface modes in chirped plasmonic arrays

We show that chirped metal-dielectric waveguide arrays with focusing cubic nonlinearity can support plasmonic lattice solitons that undergo self-deflection in the transverse plane. Such lattice solitons are deeply subwavelength self-sustained excitations, although they cover several periods of the array. Upon propagation, the excitations accelerate in the transverse plane and follow trajectories curved in the direction in which the separation between neighboring metallic layers decreases, a phenomenon that yields considerable deflection angles. The deflection angle can be controlled by varying the array chirp. We also reveal the existence of surface modes at the boundary of truncated plasmonic chirped array that form even in the absence of nonlinearity. (C) 2015 Optical Society of America