Photonics (Jun 2021)

Light Confinement with Structured Beams in Gold Nanoparticle Suspensions

  • Argelia Balbuena Ortega,
  • Felix E. Torres-González,
  • Valentin López Gayou,
  • Raul Delgado Macuil,
  • Gaetano Assanto,
  • Karen Volke-Sepulveda

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/photonics8060221
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 8, no. 6
p. 221

Abstract

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We carry out an experimental campaign to investigate the nonlinear self-defocusing propagation of singular light beams with various complex structures of phase and intensity in a colloidal suspension of gold nanoparticles with a plasmonic resonance near the laser wavelength (532nm). Studying optical vortices embedded in Gaussian beams, Bessel vortices and Bessel-cosine (necklace) beams, we gather evidence that while intense vortices turn into two-dimensional dark solitons, all structured wavepackets are able to guide a weak Gaussian probe of different wavelength (632.8 nm) along the dark core. The probe confinement also depends on the topological charge of the singular pump.

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