Surface plasmon interference fringes in back-reflection

We report the experimental observation of surface plasmon polariton (SPP) interference fringes with near-unity visibility and half-wavelength periodicity obtained in back reflection on a Bragg mirror. The presented method based on leakage radiation microscopy (LRM) represents an alternative solution to optical near-field analysis and opens new ways for the quantitative analysis of SPP fringes. With LRM we investigate various SPP interference patterns and analyze the high reflectivity of Bragg mirror in comparison with theoretical models.