Surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) have found numerous applications in photonics, but traditional devices to excite them (such as grating and prism couplers) all suffer inherent low-efficiency issues, since the generated SPPs can decouple back to free space and the reflection at the device surface can never be avoided. Here, based on a transparent gradient metasurface, we propose a new SPP-excitation scheme and numerically demonstrate that it exhibits inherently high efficiency ( 94%), since the designed meta-coupler kills both the decoupling and the reflection at its surface. As a proof of concept, we fabricate a meta-coupler in the microwave regime, and combine near- and far-field experiments to demonstrate that the achieved SPP-excitation efficiency reaches 75%, which is several times higher than all other available devices. Our findings can inspire the designs and realizations of high-performance plasmonic devices to harvest light-matter interactions.
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