The advent of telecommunication over a century ago spurred an interest among scientists in surface waves. As early as 1907, while researching wireless telegraphy,Jonathan Zenneck analyzed the propagation of electromagnetic waves over extended metal surfaces. 1 Fifty years later, the possibility that metals support surface waves was revisited in the context of elementary excitations in solids. Rufus Ritchie predicted that fast-moving charged particles could excite surface waves in metal foils in addition to bulk plasma oscillations. 2 That was soon confirmed by experiments, and the term surface plasmon (SP) was born (see box 1). At the time, probably few would have expected SPs to generate the tremendous interest that they do today, all the way from quantum optics and data storage to spectroscopy and medicine.
In the early 1960s, SPs were mainly of academic interest until researchers realized that the intense electromagnetic fields associated with SPs generated in the...
