Experimental demonstration and numerical study of plasmon-soliton waves

Merging the fields of plasmonics and nonlinear optics authorizes a variety of fascinating and original physical phenomena. In this work, we specifically study the combination of the strong light confinement ability of surface plasmon polaritons (SPP) with the beam self-trapping effect in a nonlinear optical Kerr medium. Although this idea of plasmon-soliton has been the subject of numerous theoretical papers since the eighties [1–4], up to now, no experimental evidence had been revealed yet. In the present study, a proper structure (Fig. 1a) has been designed and fabricated allowing the first experimental demonstration of these hybrid nonlinear waves merging spatial solitons and SPP.