Propagation and active control of femtosecond plasmon pulses

The authors report on the ultrafast modulation of propagating fs SPP signal via direct optical excitation of the metal component of an aluminium/silica waveguide and investigate spectral dependence of the effect and its kinetics. The authors also analyse numerically the nonlinear SPP pulse propagation regimes, including self-focusing, pulse compression and solitons, supported by the nonlinearity of the metal component of the waveguide.