TY - JOUR
T1 - Observation of coherence-related phenomena in experiments with surface plasmon polaritons excited by fluorescence
AU - Dominguez, Daniel
AU - Desai, Darshan B.
AU - Regan, Charles J.
AU - Lopez-Boada, Roberto
AU - Bernussi, Ayrton A.
AU - Grave-De-Peralta, Luis
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was partially supported by the NSF CAREER Award (ECCS- 0954490 ).
PY - 2014/3/15
Y1 - 2014/3/15
N2 - We describe experiments using a plasmon-coupled leakage radiation microscope where Surface Plasmon Polaritons (SPP) were excited by spontaneous emission of dye molecules. We report the seemingly contradictory observation of various coherence-related phenomena in these experiments and present a detailed explanation of our findings. We show that the apparent discrepancy between the incoherent character of the fluorescence and the coherent nature of the observed phenomena can be simply explained by recognizing that the short coherence length of the fluorescence is comparable to the propagation length of the excited SPPs. Our analysis then demonstrates that SPPs excited by fluorescence can be considered as a coherent illumination source in SPP microscopy.
AB - We describe experiments using a plasmon-coupled leakage radiation microscope where Surface Plasmon Polaritons (SPP) were excited by spontaneous emission of dye molecules. We report the seemingly contradictory observation of various coherence-related phenomena in these experiments and present a detailed explanation of our findings. We show that the apparent discrepancy between the incoherent character of the fluorescence and the coherent nature of the observed phenomena can be simply explained by recognizing that the short coherence length of the fluorescence is comparable to the propagation length of the excited SPPs. Our analysis then demonstrates that SPPs excited by fluorescence can be considered as a coherent illumination source in SPP microscopy.
KW - Coherence
KW - Fluorescence
KW - Plasmon-coupled leakage radiation
KW - Surface Plasmon Polariton
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84890062792&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.optcom.2013.11.023
DO - 10.1016/j.optcom.2013.11.023
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84890062792
VL - 315
SP - 270
EP - 274
JO - Optics Communications
JF - Optics Communications
SN - 0030-4018
ER -