Surface plasmon-assisted widefield non-linear imaging of gold structures

Summary In this paper, we demonstrate how the confinement and enhancement of optical fields by surface plasmon resonance can allow non-linear microscopy to be performed in a simple, cost-effective widefield configuration, rather than the more usual laser-scanning arrangement. We present second harmonic and two-photon luminescence widefield images of dielectric and gold samples obtained with both prism-based and high numerical aperture objective (‘prismless’) microscope arrangements.