Pulse modulation by Bloch surface wave excitation.

Considering dielectric multilayers with N identical bilayers and an additional terminating layer, we address the effect of Bloch surface wave excitation on the temporal characteristics of short optical pulses. When such a resonant excitation occurs within the spectrum of the incident pulse, the reflected pulse splits into leading and trailing parts, the latter having an exponentially decaying tail. The role of the number of bilayers and the level of absorption in the multilayer stack is illustrated.