All optical divergence and gradient operators using surface plasmon polaritons

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a plasmonic structure based on Kretschmann configuration capable of performing various computational tasks, i.e. two dimensional isotropic differentiation, gradient and divergence computation. By means of two polarizers, a non-trivial topological charge can be generated in the transfer function of the structure thereby implementing a two dimensional differentiator. By using only one polarizer, on the other hand, the structure is able to compute either the gradient of the field distribution of a polarized light beam or the divergence of the field of an unpolarized light beam. The performance of the proposed structure in two dimensional differentiation has been assessed and compared with its other counterparts by a figure of merit introduced in [Opt. Express28, 898 (2020)10.1364/OE.379492]. The result proves the dominance of our two-dimensional differentiator over similar works in the literature.