Comment on “Far-Field Optical Microscopy with a Nanometer-Scale Resolution Based on the In-Plane Image Magnification by Surface Plasmon Polaritons”

A Comment on the Letter by Igor I. Smolyaninov et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 94, 057401 (2005). The authors of the Letter offer a Reply.

Figure 1

Dispersion relation for bound SPPs propagating on a 50 nm thick gold film (medium 1) surrounded by glass (medium 2) and glycerin (medium 0). (a) shows the dispersion for the real part of the SPP wave vectors while (b) shows the imaginary part. The red and blue curves correspond to the two bound modes [see inset in (b) for the tangential magnetic field profiles]. The green and magenta curves show the dispersion for SPPs bound at single interfaces $\mathrm{\text{gold}}/\mathrm{\text{glass}}$ and $\mathrm{\text{gold}}/\mathrm{\text{glycerin}}$, respectively. The horizontal black lines show the range of frequency used in 1, 2, 3. The light lines for glass (continuous) and glycerin (dashed) are included in (a).