ABSTRACT
Dramatic improvements in fabrication have brought about a renaissance for some well-established topics, such as plasmonics. Plasmonics has an interesting history. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Robert Williams Wood observed unknown optical features in the reflection spectrum of metallic gratings.1 In 1956 Ugo Fano introduced the term polariton to define the coupling between bound electrons and incoming photons,2 and in 1968 the scientists Dr. Heinz Raether, Eric Kretschmann, and Andreas Otto presented methods for coupling photons on a flat metallic surface.3,4 By that point the most important aspects related to plasmonics were well known, but fabrication technique limitations prevented their application at the nanoscale level. Luckily, we are now in a situation where this is possible, which clearly explains the vast interest in plasmonics more than a hundred years after the work of Robert Wood.
