Heinz Raether Surface Plasmons on Smooth and Rough Surfaces and on Gratings With 113 Figures ¢,| Springer-Verlag ;/| Berlin Heidelberg New York ?_| London Paris TokyoPreface This review describes the basic physics of surface plasmons (SPs) propagat- ing on smooth and corrugated surfaces. SPs represent electromagnetic surface waves that have their intensity maximum in the surface and exponentially de- caying fields perpendicular to it. They can be produced not only by electrons, Dut also by light in an optical device called the attenuated total reflection (ATR). An important property of the SPs is their coupling with photons via corrugated surfaces and vice versa, so that the SPs become involved in a series of optical phenomena. With the excitation of SPs by light, a strong enhance- ment of the electromagnetic field in the surface (resonance amplification) is combined, which can be rather strong. This has been demonstrated first by the excitation of SPs on a rough silver surface which emits light at an inten- sity nearly 100 times stronger in resonance than out of resonance. This field enhancement has found many applications: enhanced photoeffect by SPs, non- linear effects as the production of second harmonic generation (SHG) in the strong field, surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS), amplification of light seattered at Rayleigh waves, emission of light from tunnel junctions, ete. Also in fairly thin films, a strong field enhancement has been measured for the high- frequency mode. This enhancement is correlated with a strong reduction of the reflected light up to a complete transformation of the incoming light into SPs. This reflectivity minimum represents an interesting phenomenon of metal optics on smooth and corrugated surfaces. The SPs propagating along a corrugated surface decay into light of high intensity on a nonsmooth surface. The measurement of its intensity and its angular distribution allows determination of the roughness parameter, r.m.s. height, and correlation length. Also in normal scattering experiments on rough surfaces the SPs can be excited via the corrugation (grating coupling) and change the angular distribution of the diffusely scattered light. Recent devel- opments of the theory seem to indicate an explanation of these phenomena. Recent developments have further shown that the very large field enhance- (104-108) observed in SERS and in SHG are due mainly to localized ; they exist only in very rough surfaces built up of large particles. A chapter is dedicated to the influence of SPs on grating phenomena. Due to the simpler structure of the corrugation, the results sometimes give a more detailed insight into the interaction between the photon and plasmon. The application vuof holographic (interference) gratings especially of sinusoidal gratings to which higher harmonics can be added, together with the possibility of varying the grating constant, grating amplitude, and grating material rather simply has given strong impetus to this field. The author has described the same subject in an earlier article. But in the meantime a number of new results have been reported, which has increased the interest in this subject, so that a more comprehensive account of the behavior of SPs on corrugated surfaces appeared to be desirable. Thave to thank John Simon (Toledo) for a critical reading of the first. ver- sion of the manuscript. Helpful discussions with Vittorio Celli (Charlottesville) and A.M. Marvin (Trieste) are acknowledged. Additional information from nu- merous colleagues has been used to answer open questions. Hamburg, December 1986 Heinz Raether vil