Article ID Journal Published Year Pages File Type
1534853 Optics Communications 2014 5 Pages PDF
Abstract

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.

Related Topics
Physical Sciences and Engineering Materials Science Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials
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