Raman Scattering of Light from Coherently Excited Surface Polaritons

Abstract

There is currently active interest in the study of the surface polaritons (SP) which propagate along the interface between two dielectric media.1 In this paper we present preliminary results of the first experimental study of the Raman scattering (RS) of a probe beam from surface phonon polaritons coherently excited by infrared laser radiation. This process can be viewed either in term of Stokes and anti-Stokes RS from hot SP or as optical mixing (generation of sum and difference frequencies) of bulk and surface polaritons via the second-order nonlinear susceptibility. The main advantages of this technique over spontaneous RS are determined by a considerable and selective enhancement of the scattered light intensity. In this way, in particular, it is possible to observe the RS from SP in bulk samples. (Experiments on spontaneous RS from SP were performed so far only on thin samples).1