Transient temperature induced plasmonic crystal

We suggest an easily configurable dynamical method of creating a periodic quasi-2D plasmonic lattice in a metal film by temperature induced variation of the dielectric permittivity. The temperature variations in turn are controlled by two pairs of perpendicular pump beams irradiating the metal surface. By varying the incident angles of the beams one can control the effective spatial periods of the lattice while the erasure time is given by the pulse duration raging from pico- to nanoseconds. We show that the modulation effect is most prominent in the imaginary part of the metal dielectric function and thus the obtained plasmonic crystal is fully dissipative. We also demonstrate that such crystal displays reduced absorption at the Brillouin zone boundary and calculate the transmission as a function of the transient contrast of the lattice.