Nanoplasmonic near-field synthesis

Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use. The MIT Faculty has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters. The temporal response of resonances in nanoplasmonic structures typically converts an incoming few-cycle field into a much longer near-field at the spot where nonlinear physical phenomena including electron emission, recollision, and high-harmonic generation can take place. We show that for practically useful structures pulse shaping of the incoming pulse can be used to synthesize the plasmon-enhanced field and enable single-cycle-driven nonlinear physical phenomena. Our method is demonstrated for the generation of an isolated attosecond pulse by plasmon-enhanced high harmonic generation. We furthermore show that optimal control techniques can be used even if the response of the plasmonic structure is not known a priori.