Experimental demonstration of plasmon-soliton waves

Controlling low power light beam self-confinement with ultrafast response time opens up opportunities for the development of signal processing in microdevices. The combination of highly nonlinear medium with the tight confinement of plasmonic waves offers a viable but challenging configuration to reach this goal. Here, we report the experimental observation of plasmon-soliton waves propagating in a chalcogenide-based four-layer planar geometry engineered to limit plasmon propagation losses while exhibiting efficient Kerr self-focusing at moderate power. The observations reveal a strongly enhanced self-focusing undergone by a self-trapped beam propagating inside the structure. As expected, only TM polarized waves exhibit such a behavior. Different experimental arrangements are tested that unambiguously reveal the nonlinear plasmon-soliton coupling which is corroborated by numerical simulations.