Coupling surface waves to propagating plane waves in free

space
It has been demonstrated that surface modes have a strong influence in the modification of the
density of electromagnetic states at the interface of materials that support them. Their intensity is
many orders of magnitude larger in the near field than in the far field. This decaying characteristic
of the surface waves makes it impossible to propagate them directly into free space. To circumvent
this shortcoming of surface waves, several approaches have been proposed in the literature to
couple them into propagating plane waves. For example, a well-known technique in the literature
that has been used is coupling surface waves to propagating waves is through using internal
reflection inside a prism. (Le Gall, Olivier and Greffet, 1997; Joulain et al., 2005)Although this
approach is useful for characterizing the contribution of surface waves to near-field, it is by no
means a practical approach to tailor near-field effects to far-field. Thus finding a practical approach
was essential to solve this problem.
Quasi-monochromatic nature of surface waves causes high level of correlation in near-field for
thermal radiation. Extending this high level of correlation to far-field thermal emission and
achieving directional preference is the main reason for the growing interest towards coupling
surface waves to propagating waves. (Marquier et al., 2004) But we know that surface phonon
polaritons are decaying surface waves that propagate parallel to the interface of polar material and
host medium (i.e., air or vacuum), hence it is impossible to see any peaks in the far-field emissivity
or reflectivity spectrum of an unstructured polar sample that could be attributed to surface waves.
On the other hand, it is known that modes in a planar dielectric waveguide can be coupled to a
vacuum half-space by using a grating that efficiently diffracts the guided mode. Similarly, by
ruling a grating on an interface supporting a surface wave, it is possible to couple it to propagating
waves (result of the reciprocity theorem). Indeed, the field of the surface wave is scattered by each
period of the grating. Since the phase of the surface wave is well defined over a large distance
given by its decay length, the fields scattered by different periods of the grating can interfere
constructively for some well-defined directions. Thus, it appears that the directivity of the source,
that has grating structure on it, is a direct consequence of interferences and hence, of nearfield
spatial coherence.(Greffet and Henkel, 2007)
A set of pioneering theoretical predictions and experimental work was presented by (Hesketh,
Gebhart and Zemel, 1988; Hesketh, Zemel and Gebhart, 1988b, 1988a) who investigated the
thermal emission from 1D deep gratings. They showed that grating structures exhibit significantly
higher emissivity values at some frequencies. Following this trend, and by employing rigorous
coupled wave analysis followed by experimental characterization of dispersion relations, Greffet
et al showed that highly directional thermal emission could be achieved for 1-D silicon carbide
gratings. This property stems from the diffraction of the thermally excited surface-phonons
polaritons. (Arnold et al., 2012) Greffet’s research group has worked continuously on this problem
since 1997 and they published more than 30 papers on how to manipulate emissivity through
microstructures.
A key feature in their method is predicting the behavior of nanostructures through dispersion
relation and grating equation. The diffraction equation for a grating with period of Λ is given
by(Marquier et al., 2004):

Where m is the diffraction order and 𝑘𝐼𝐼 is the wavevector of the surface mode. Consider a situation
where the grating structure has been illuminated by a propagating plane wave with angle θ. Then
according to the equation above, it can be coupled to a surface mode which can lead to total
absorption of the incident wave. The reciprocal situation would be the coupling of thermally
excited surface phonon polaritons to the thermally emitted propagating waves in the direction of
θ.
This section will be continued by Greffet’s approach using dispersion relation.

References
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