Wavefront engineering of semiconductor lasers using plasmonics

Plasmonics involves manipulation of surface plasmons (SPs), which are collective oscillations of surface electrons in metal interacting with an electromagnetic field. Plasmonic structures provide compact and integrated optical processing, where planar metallic structures can be used to manipulate the amplitude and phase of SPs in two dimensions at the subwavelength level. By integrating plasmonic structures on active optical devices, one can engineer and fabricate devices with small footprints and special beam profiles in the near-field and/or in the far-field. This talk summarizes our recent work on building integrated plasmonic collimators, beam splitters, and polarizers for semiconductor lasers.