Shaping plasmonic light beams with near-field plasmonic holograms

We introduce a new class of plasmonic holograms for the near field. These holograms provide complete control of the amplitude and phase of surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs), thereby enabling the generation of any desired plasmonic light beam. The scheme is based on a two-dimensional near-field plasmonic hologram, which couples the SPP from free space into the metal-dielectric interface, and also sets the attributes of the plasmonic beam. We demonstrate the concept for a wide variety of plasmonic beams with different qualities-in particular, self-similar Hermite-Gauss beams, nondiffracting cosine-Gauss beams, and self-accelerating Airy beams. (C) 2014 Optical Society of America