Determination of coupling rate of light emitter to surface plasmon polaritons supported on nanohole array

It is known that surface plasmon mediated fluorescence comprises of excitation and emission enhancements. In particular, for emission enhancement, the energy from the excited emitters is first coupled to surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs), which in turn radiatively scatter to far-field. However, these two sequential processes are rarely studied individually, making the understanding of them difficult. Here, we decouple them by using rate equation model and study the coupling as a function of emission wavelength by finite-difference time-domain simulation. As a demonstration, we measure the coupling rate of styryl 8 fluorescent dyes to SPPs on Au nanohole array in Gamma-X direction. (C) 2013 AIP Publishing LLC.