My work on self-recovering long-range surface plasmons in gold-filled optical fibers was recently published in Phys. Rev. Applied! It’s satisfying to see that my original goal of measuring ultrafast nonlinear plasmonic effects on gold nanowires within optical fibers – which formed the crux of my original Humboldt Fellowship to Jena – has come to fruition. Since my original proposal was written in 2014 there has been quite a lot of great work in this field! One of the greatest problems for plasmonic propagation in nanowires in fibers was that, for small wire diameters, the wires break up, and scatter off light at the gaps. As it turns out, if these wires are inside the core of a waveguide (such as an optical fiber), it’s possible to circumvent this, since most of the scattered light is captured by the waveguide, and then immediately fed back into the plasmon! This process is efficient enough to enable measurements of the nonlinearity of gold (via nonlinear absorption) which crucially requires high peak powers to be maintained. Read the article here.