Digital coding and digital modulation are the foundation of modern information science. The combination of digital technology with metamaterials provides a powerful scheme for spatial and temporal controls of electromagnetic waves. Such a technique, however, has thus far been limited to the control of free-space light. Its application to plasmonics to shape subwavelength fields still remains elusive. Here, we report the design and experimental realization of a tunable conformal plasmonic metasurface, which is capable of digitally coding and modulating designer surface plasmons at the deep-subwavelength scale. Based on dynamical switching between two discrete dispersion states in a controlled manner, we achieve digital modulations of both amplitude and phase of surface waves with nearly 100% modulation depth on a single device. Our study not only introduces a new approach for active dispersion engineering, but also constitutes an important step towards the realization of subwavelength integrated plasmonic circuits.
Keywords: digital coding; digital metamaterials; digital modulation; plasmonics.
© The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of China Science Publishing & Media Ltd.