Surface plasmon fluorescence microscopy: an analysis

This paper examines the imaging performance of surface plasmon microscopes operating in the far field. Until recently the accepted view has been that the achievable lateral resolution with a surface plasmon imaging system is limited by propagation decay length of the surface plasmons rather than by diffraction. We show by simulation that the lateral resolution of a surface plasmon imaging system can be comparable to that of the best optical microscopes. We also show that new imaging modes such as two‐photon and also second harmonic surface plasmon microscopy are extremely promising imaging modes that may be expected to be powerful techniques for the analysis of surface structures.