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Updated: May 31, 2026

Determination of the Excitation and Coupling Rates Between Light Emitters and Surface Plasmon Polaritons
Published on: July 21, 2018
Angle-and polarization-dependent collective excitation of plasmonic nanoarrays for surface enhanced infrared
Vladimir Liberman1, Ronen Adato, Alket Mertiri
1Lincoln Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Lexington, Massachusetts 02420, USA. vlad@ll.mit.edu
Abstract:
Our recent work has showed that diffractively coupled nanoplasmonic arrays for Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) microspectroscopy can enhance the Amide I protein vibrational stretch by up to 10(5) times as compared to plain substrates. In this work we consider computationally the impact of a microscope objective illumination cone on array performance. We derive an approach for computing angular- and spatially-averaged reflectance for various numerical aperture (NA) objectives. We then use this approach to show that arrays that are perfectly optimized for normal incidence undergo significant response degradation even at modest NAs, whereas arrays that are slightly detuned from the perfect grating condition at normal incidence irradiation exhibit only a slight drop in performance when analyzed with a microscope objective. Our simulation results are in good agreement with microscope measurements of experimentally optimized periodic nanoplasmonic arrays.

