Coherence and aberration effects in surface plasmon polariton imaging

TL;DR

This paper presents a comprehensive theoretical and experimental analysis of coherent imaging of surface plasmon polaritons, addressing aberrations and providing a unified framework for interpreting various microscopy techniques.

Contribution

It introduces a rigorous modal formalism based on scalar Whittaker potentials for analyzing coherent surface plasmon polariton imaging, including aberration effects and experimental validation.

Findings

The developed theory accurately interprets optical images from different microscopy methods.

Aberrations due to index mismatch significantly affect surface plasmon polariton imaging.

Experimental results align well with the theoretical predictions.

Abstract

We study theoretically and experimentally coherent imaging of surface plasmon polaritons using either leakage radiation microscopy through a thin metal film or interference microscopy through a thick metal film. Using a rigorous modal formalism based on scalar Whittaker potentials we develop a systematic analytical and vectorial method adapted to the analysis of coherent imaging involving surface plasmon polaritons. The study includes geometrical aberrations due index mismatch which played an important role in the interpretation of recent experiments using leakage radiation microscopy. We compare our theory with experiments using classical or quantum near-field scanning optical microscopy probes and show that the approach leads to a full interpretation of the recorded optical images.