Abstract

Optical excitation of surface plasma wave, SPW, in the attenuated-total-reflection, ATR, of the Kretschmann configuration is a very powerful device to obtain optical constants of thin metal films[1,2]. However surface roughness usually influences the results and has two effects: (1) shift the ATR curve(and broaden its half-width) and (2) change the reflection minimum of the ATR curve. Considering a prism-metal film-vacuum configuration as shown in Fig. 1, SPW will be excited when the incident angle of p-polarized light of frequency ω is larger than the critical angle.

© 1998 Optical Society of America