Optical Excitation of Surface Plasmon Polariton in Thin Gold, silver and Copper Metal Layers and Measuring the Metal Layer

In this paper, we employed the attenuated total reflection (ATR) technique to theoretically and experimentally measure the thickness of metal thin films and compare together them. The computations of the present study were carried out using characteristics matrix method. The ATR technique is based on the excitation of surface polaritons. In the ATR spectra polariton, the surface polaritons manifest themselves as sharp reflectivity minima. We used this minimum to measure the thickness of a silver layer coated on the surface of a prism. We observed that the measured value has a good agreement with the real thickness of the layer.