Atom probing of thermally populated surface polaritons

Thermal emission has been the historic paradigm to understand quantization of energy, for light and matter. However, the universal far field blackbody radiation is not sufficient to account for the near field effects of the thermal emission [1]. When matter is heated up, surface polaritons at its boundary become thermally excited, and intense electromagnetic fields evanescently decay away from the surface. For a given material, with a well-defined shape, the population of these surface modes obeys a thermodynamic distribution, according to the local density of states in vacuum near the interface. In addition, rising up the temperature is susceptible to induce phenomenological changes of the surface mode resonances, such as broadening or shift.