Characterization of Surface-Plasmon Polaritons at Lossy Interfaces

Abstract

We characterize surface-plasmon polaritons at lossy planar interfaces between one dispersive and one nondispersive linear isotropic homogeneous media, i.e., materials or metamaterials. Specifically we solve Maxwell's equations to obtain strict bounds for the permittivity and permeability of these media such that satisfying these bounds implies surface-plasmon polaritons successfully propagate at the interface, and violation of the bounds impedes propagation, i.e., the field delocalizes from the surface into the bulk. Our characterization of surface-plasmon polaritons is valuable for checking viability of a proposed application, and, as an example, we employ our method to falsify a previous prediction that surface-plasmon propagation through a surface of a double-negative refractive index medium occurs for any permittivity and permeability; instead we show that propagation can occur only for certain medium parameters.

arXiv comment17 pages, 5 figures

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Cited by in corpus (2)

• Polaritonic frequency-comb generation and breather propagation in a negative-index metamaterial with a cold four-level atomic medium
• Surface-polaritonic phase singularities and multimode polaritonic frequency combs via dark rogue-wave excitation in hybrid plasmonic waveguide