Fabrication of surface plasmon based diffractive optical element and its application for a wavelength-selection filter

The interaction between electrons and photons satisfying a resonant condition in the boundary between metallic material and dielectric material can generate a surface-bound wave exponentially decaying away from the interface. Particularly, the intensity caused by the surface plasmon wave is considerably high on the interface when the incident angle of the monochromatic wave satisfies the resonant condition. Thus, adopting this wave makes it possible to generate a highly intense reference wave propagating along the interface in hologram. Recently, it is shown that applications and researches based on surface plasmon resonance can be applied for photonic integrated circuits and devices. However, feasible methods to fabricate a nano-scale structure using the surface confined (2-dimensional) wave caused by surface plasmon resonance require us to use thin photosensitive recording material. Some notable methods to fabricate nano-scale devices made from PMMA (polymethyl methacrylate) have been already shown. In this paper, by using the property that the incident monochromatic light can be absorbed in the interface of the metallic medium and the dielectric medium when a certain resonance condition is satisfied, we propose a wavelength selection filter fabricated by a phase mask with the pitch of 1061.1nm and phase conjugation holography. In the experiment, two monochromatic light sources, He-Ne laser with the wavelength of 633nm and second harmonic Nd-YAG laser with the wavelength of 532nm, will be used. The fabricated lamella metal-coated grating using the phase mask will be shown, and the volumetric metal-coated photopolymer grating will be used to verify our proposed wavelength selection filter.