Surface-polaritonic phase singularities and multimode polaritonic frequency combs via dark rogue-wave excitation in hybrid plasmonic waveguide

Abstract

Material characteristics and input-field specifics limit controllability of nonlinear electromagnetic-field interactions. As these nonlinear interactions could be exploited to create strongly localized bright and dark waves, such as nonlinear surface polaritons, ameliorating this limitation is important. We present our approach to amelioration, which is based on a surface-polaritonic waveguide reconfiguration that enables excitation, propagation and coherent control of coupled dark rogue waves having orthogonal polarizations. Our control mechanism is achieved by finely tuning laser-field intensities and their respective detuning at the interface between the atomic medium and the metamaterial layer. In particular, we utilize controllable electromagnetically induced transparency windows commensurate with surface-polaritonic polarization-modulation instability to create symmetric and asymmetric polaritonic frequency combs associated with dark localized waves. Our method takes advantage of an atomic self-defocusing nonlinearity and dark rogue-wave propagation to obtain a sufficient condition for generating phase singularities. Underpinning this method is our theory which incorporates dissipation and dispersion due to the atomic medium being coupled to nonlinear surface-polaritonic waves. Consequently, our waveguide configuration acts as a bimodal polaritonic frequency-comb generator and high-speed phase rotator, thereby opening prospects for phase singularities in nanophotonic and quantum communication devices.

Keywords

• plasmonic waveguide
• surface plasmon polariton
• rogue wave
• electromagnetically induced transparency
• frequency comb