Optical Response of Nanostructured Surfaces: Experimental Investigation of the Composite Diffracted Evanescent Wave Model

Investigations of the optical response of subwavelength structure arrays milled into thin metal films has revealed surprising phenomena including reports of unexpectedly high transmission of light. Many studies have interpreted the optical coupling to the surface in terms of the resonant excitation of surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs), but other approaches involving composite diffraction of surface evanescent waves (CDEW) have also been proposed. We present here a series of measurements on very simple one-dimensional (1-D) subwavelength structures with the aim of testing key properties of the surface waves and comparing them to the CDEW and SPP models.