Surface polariton

A surface polariton is a polariton that arises from the strong coupling of the evanescent field at the interface of a (bulk) material and the material excitations lying there, initially still an exciton (nowadays plasmons are more common). Because the evanescent field is localized, there can be strong (polaritonic) coupling at the surface, with no cavity.

This pre-dated the more important and versatile type of cavity-polariton and was initially seen as a variation of the bulk (Hopfield) polariton, so mainly a curiosity or particular case. This was ignored by Weisbuch when he reported his effect. This differs to the waveguide polariton although this—also a precursor to the cavity polariton—was initially regarded as a surface polariton too. They were all called, then, 2D-polaritons. Weisbuch also ignore waveguide polaritons, only citing the paper by J. Knoester.

Notable early works include:

• Experimental Observation of Surface Exciton Polaritons. J. Lagois and B. Fischer in Phys. Rev. Lett. 36:680 (1976).
• Nonlinear Optical Excitation of Surface Exciton Polaritons in ZnO. F. DeMartini, M. Colocci, S. Kohn and Y. Shen in Phys. Rev. Lett. 38:1223 (1977).