Plasmon surface polariton luminescence from periodic metal gratings

Abstract

When a gold grating is illuminated at an appropriate energy, polarization, and angle to excite a plasmon surface polariton (SP) all lower energy radiative SP states emit light. This enables the dispersion of SP states to be mapped by luminescence providing an alternative to reflectivity measurements. A similar effect has been observed for bare silver gratings, and silver gratings coated with several layers of cadmium arachidate by Langmuir-Blodgett technique. Two additional effects have been observed for Au gratings. First, one can obtain emission from radiative SP states by exciting the interband transition directly with photons of energy greater than approximately 2.4 eV. At these energies, SP states do not exist because the metal dielectric function has a large imaginary part. This is significant because it suggests that the degradation pathway involves electron-hole pair states as intermediates. Second, some gold gratings show surface enhanced Raman of molecular species superimposed on the SP luminescence emission.