Distinct spatiotemporal imaging of femtosecond surface plasmon polaritons assisted with the opening of the two-color quantum pathway effect

Accurately capturing the spatiotemporal information of surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) is the basis for expanding SPP applications. Here, we report spatio-temporal evolution imaging of femtosecond SPPs launched from a rectangular trench in silver film with a 400-nm light pulse assisted femtosecond laser interferometric time-resolved (ITR) photoemission electron microscopy. It is found that introducing the 400nm light pulse in the spatially separated nearinfrared (NIR) laser pump-probe ITR scheme enables distinct spatiotemporal imaging of the femtosecond SPPs with a weak probe pulse in the ITR scheme, which is free from the risk of sample damage due to the required high monochromatic field for a clear photoelectron image as well as the entangled interference fringe (between the SPPs and probe pulse) in the usual spatially overlapped pump-probe ITR scheme. The demonstrated great improvement of the visibility of the SPPs spatiotemporal image with an additional 400nm light pulse scheme facilitates further analysis of the femtosecond SPPs, and carrier wavelength (785nm), group velocity (0.94C) and phase velocity (0.98C) of SPPs are extracted from the distinct spatio-temporal evolution images of SPPs. Furthermore, the modulation of photoemission induced by the quantum pathway interference effect in the 400nm-assisted scheme is proposed to play a major role in the distinct visualization for SPPs. The probabilities of electrons in different quantum pathways are obtained quantitatively through fitting the experimental results with the quantum pathway interference model. The probability that electrons emit through the quantum pathway allows us to quantitatively analyze the contribution to electron emission from the different quantum pathways. These findings pave a way for the spatiotemporal imaging of the near-infrared light-induced SPPs, such as the communication wave band using PEEM. (C) 2020 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement