Surface Plasmons and some of their applications
Résumé
Surface Plasmons (SP) are electromagnetic modes that do exist at the interface between a dielectric and a metal. For metallic particles (spheres, ellipsoids...), such modes are termed localized surface plasmons (LSP). They are at origin of the red colour of Au colloidal solutions and that of the famous Lycurgus cup (Roman glass cup now in the British muséum : it appears red when enlightened from inside and green if fenlightened from outside). Their unique properties (high sensitivity to the environment, extreme confinement, enhanced field strength, fields squeezing...) make them suitable for many applications ranging from chemical and biological sensors to extremely miniaturized optical devices. Furthermore, they play an important role in some recently discovered physical phenomena like "hot spots" on rough surfaces or the extraordinary enhanced transmission through "subwavelength photon sieves". In this talk, I will make a review on SP and LSP with special focus on their applications and I will present our recent research on strong coupling between SPs and optical waveguides.