Direct calculation of the strong Goos-Hänchen effect of a Gaussian light beam due to the excitation of surface plasmon polaritons in the Otto configuration

Abstract

We study theoretically the influence of the surface plasmon excitation on the Goos-Hänchen lateral shift of a $p$-polarized Gaussian beam incident obliquely on a dielectric-metal bilayer in the Otto configuration. We find that the lateral shift depends sensitively on the thickness of the metal layer and the width of the incident beam, as well as on the incident angle. Near the incident angle at which surface plasmons are excited, the lateral shift changes from large negative values to large positive values as the thickness of the metal layer increases through a critical value. For wide incident beams, the maximal forward and backward lateral shifts can be as large as several hundred times of the wavelength. As the width of the incident Gaussian beam decreases, the magnitude of the lateral shift decreases rapidly, but the ratio of the width of the reflected beam to that of the incident beam, which measures the degree of the deformation of the reflected beam profile, increases. In all cases considered, we find that the reflected beam is split into two parts. We also find that the lateral shift of the transmitted beam is always positive and very weak.

arXiv comment16 pages, 7 figures

References in corpus (7)

• Strong coupling between surface plasmon polaritons and emitters
• Giant Goos-Hanchen effect at the reflection from left-handed metamaterials
• Theory of the propagation of coupled waves in arbitrarily-inhomogeneous stratified media
• Closed form expression for the Goos-Haenchen lateral displacement
• The oscillatory behavior of light in the composite Goos-Haenchen shift
• The asymmetric Goos-Hänchen effect
• Incidence angles maximizing the Goos-Haenchen shift in seismic data analysis