Abstract
Surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) are propagating excitations that arise from the coupling of light with collective oscillations of the electrons at the surface of a metal. SPPs are highly localized to the interface of the metal/dielectric, so that the intensity is greatly enhanced at the 2-dimentional (2D) interface. The enhancement makes the SPPs very sensitive to the condition of the interface and it has gathered great research interests in several fields, such as surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS), nonlinear optics, fluorescence enhancement, and so on. On the other hand, as a natural 2D system, SPP is a promising candidate for the all optical integrated circuits. It is well known that photon is better than electron as an information carrier, while photon is not as good as electron in integration. SPP is a promising carrier to make photonic devices more integrated, so that it becomes a very hot research topic in photonics. However, the dispersion of SPP lies to the right side of the light cone. The wavevector of SPP is larger than that of light, which prevents the direct coupling between SPP and the light in free space. The problem was solved with the development of nanofabrication technology. As a result, more and more research on SPP was carried out, on both theoretical and experimental sides, which provided people better understanding of SPP. A series of remarkable progresses have been achieved on the modulation of SPP propagation, which will be very good references for the future all-optical integration. In this chapter, we will first introduce the basic physics of SPPs. It will followed by the introduction of the excitation and the observation of SPPs in experiment. We will specially discuss leakage radiation microscopy (LRM), which is a very popular observation method for SPPs and it is also used in our research. With these experiment preparations, we will then introduce some preliminary in-plane manipulation of the SPPs with the Bragg’s principle, such as Bragg mirrors, MZ-interferometers, and so on.
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