How to erase surface plasmon fringes

The authors report on the imaging of surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) by leakage radiation microscopy in both direct and Fourier space. They show that manipulating the intensity distribution in the Fourier plane allows them to selectively image SPP beams propagating along specific directions. Thereby individual SPP beams are made accessible for direct quantitative analysis which is important in cases where the interaction between different SPP beams leads to interference fringes obscuring the individual components. (c) 2006 American Institute of Physics.