Phase detection of surface plasmon resonance using rotating analyzer method

This paper demonstrates the application of the rotating analyzer method to the phase measurement of surface plasmon resonance (SPR) in the Kretschmann configuration. While a few groups have adopted the heterodyne detection method for the phase measurement of SPR, few reports has been appeared on the phase detection based on the rotating analyzer method. We show that the rotating analyzer method have an index resolution of the order of 10−7, which is almost compatible with that of the heterodyne detection and is about two orders of magnitude better than the conventional SPR method based on the resonance angular detection. In addition, the rotating analyzer method has advantages that the optical setup is simple and that it is applicable to the spectroscopic measurements.