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Plasmonic enhancement of spatial dispersion effects in prism coupler experiments

Optics 2018-09-26 v1

Abstract

Recent experiments with film-coupled nanoparticles suggest that the impact of spatial dispersion is enhanced in plasmonic structures where high wavevector guided modes are excited. More advanced descriptions of the optical response of metals than Drude's are thus probably necessary in plasmonics. We show that even in classical prism coupler experiments, the plasmonic enhancement of spatial dispersion can be leveraged to make such experiments two orders of magnitude more sensitive. The realistic multilayered structures involved rely on layers that are thick enough to rule our any other phenomenon as the spill-out. Optical evanescent excitation of plasmonic waveguides using prism couplers thus constitutes an ideal platform to study spatial dispersion.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1808.03427,
  title  = {Plasmonic enhancement of spatial dispersion effects in prism coupler experiments},
  author = {Armel Pitelet and Emilien Mallet and Rabih Ajib and Caroline Lemaître and Emmanuel Centeno and Antoine Moreau},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1808.03427},
  year   = {2018}
}