Demonstration of beam steering via dipole-coupled plasmonic spiral antenna

Abstract

Optical antennas have been utilized to tailor the emission properties of nanoscale emitters in terms of the intensity, directivity and polarization. In this letter, we further explore the capability of beam steering via the use a spiral plasmonic structure as a transmitting antenna. According to both numerical simulation and experimental observations, the beaming direction can be steered through introducing a displacement of the feeding point to the spiral antenna from the geometrical center. For a 3-turn Archimedes' spiral antenna, experimental results show that steering angles of 3° and 7° are obtainable when the excitation location is transversally shifted from the center by a displacement of 200 nm and 500 nm, respectively. Furthermore, the emitted photons carry spin angular momentum determined by the chirality of the spiral optical antenna. A steerable nanoscale spin photon source may find important applications in single molecule sensing, quantum optical information processing and integrated photonic circuits.