From the various discussions on the difference between

surface plasmon resonance (SPR) and surface plasmon

polariton (SPP) I got the impression that there is some
misunderstanding of what are SPR and SPP.
It is important to understand what are plasmons. As
pointed out by some one that plasmons are oscillations of
the electrons in a plasma. Such oscillations are traveling
waves with well defined frequency and wave vector.
However, it should be noted that these plasma waves are
longitudinal waves, ie the displacement of the electrons
(relative to a uniform positive background formed by
positive ion) are parallel to the direction of propagation of
the wave. These plasma waves can exist in 2D (although
the dispersion of the wave is different from that of 3D
plasmon) or at the interface between two media (leading
to surface plasmon). When plasmons are excited one
creates plasmon resonances. The important thing to note
now is that plasmons are longitudinal waves so they
cannot be excited by a transverse wave like an
electromagnetic wave. Usually the most effective way to
excite a plasmon is to use electrons. For example, an
electron beam passing through a thin metal foil will lose
energy when it excites a plasmon. This loss in energy is
exhibited by a peak in the electron energy loss spectrum
(commonly known as EELS).
Having said that plasmons (including SPR) cannot be
excited by photons, then one can ask why there are SPP?
A polariton, by definition, is a coupled dipoleelectromagnetic wave. The best known example of
polariton is the phonon-polariton in ionic crystals first

proposed by the famous Chinese solid-state physicist:

Kun HUANG in his classic paper:
K. Huang, Lattice Vi brations and Optical Waves in Ionic
Crystals, Nature 16, 7779 (1951).
This paper pointed out that the transverse optical (TO)
phonon will couple to photon when their wave vectors
and frequencies are the same. This coupling modifies the
dispersions of both the optical phonon and photon. The
resultant coupled TO phonon-photon mode was labeled
by Huang as the polariton. The longitudinal optical (LO)
phonon cannot couple to the photon since it is a
longitudinal wave. This is the reason why plasmons in 3D
cannot form polaritons. In case of an interface, the
situation is different because a photon can be incident on
the interface at an angle. For a photon polarized in the
plane of incidence (p-polarized) the polarization can be
decomposed into two components with one perpendicular
to the interface and the other parallel to the interface.
The parallel component can then excite a surface
plasmon because this component is now a longitudinal
wave. To form a SPP, the photon and SPR must have the
same frequency and wave vector. This means that the
component of the photon wave vector parallel to the
interface has to be equal to that of the SPR. Thus to
observe a SPP one has to monitor absorption of a incident
EM wave of constant frequency as a function of the angle
of incidence on the interface (by changing the angle of
incidence one can tune the component of the photon
wave vector parallel to the interface). The presence of a
peak in the absorption will indicate the excitation of a

SPP. By varying the incident photon frequency and

determining the angle of incidence for observing the SPP
(hence the wave vector of the SPP) one can determine
the dispersion of the SPP.