Surface Optical Waves at Air/Metal Interfaces: Surface Plasmon Polaritons

The surface plasmon resonance (SPR) phenomenon has been known for nearly five decades now; since then this method has made great advances in terms of instrumentation development and applications, and it still attracts researchers because of certain subtle issues that could benefit from it mainly detection and analysis of chemical and biochemical substances in different areas including medicine, environmental monitoring, biotechnology and drug and food monitoring. Our interest is focused on the use of this technique for studying thin coating and some application in nanophotonics. In this paper, we discuss the configuration of surface plasmons at air/metal interface by Atenuated total reflection (ATR) technique in the Kretchman configuration, and we present preliminary experimental results on surface plasmons at a Ag/air interface that we obtained in our laboratory.The surface plasmon resonance (SPR) phenomenon has been known for nearly five decades now; since then this method has made great advances in terms of instrumentation development and applications, and it still attracts researchers because of certain subtle issues that could benefit from it mainly detection and analysis of chemical and biochemical substances in different areas including medicine, environmental monitoring, biotechnology and drug and food monitoring. Our interest is focused on the use of this technique for studying thin coating and some application in nanophotonics. In this paper, we discuss the configuration of surface plasmons at air/metal interface by Atenuated total reflection (ATR) technique in the Kretchman configuration, and we present preliminary experimental results on surface plasmons at a Ag/air interface that we obtained in our laboratory