An effective medium study of surface plasmon polaritons in nanostructured gratings using attenuated total reflection.

Recent work studied surface plasmon resonances in structured materials by the method of attenuated total reflection using a prism on top of a metallic grating. That calculation considered Transverse Magnetic polarized radiation, involved an expansion in 121 Fourier modes, and found a number of interesting features. Many of these features were attributed to localized plasmons or other factors, which arise from a discrete structure. We use a simple effective medium theory to address the same problem, and find many of the same reflection features observed in the more complex calculation, indicating that localization is not an important factor. We also evaluate the possibility of using some of the new features in the reflection spectrum for bio-sensing and find that the sensitivity of the system to small changes in relative permittivity is increased compared to some standard methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]