Surface electromagnetic waves at the interface between a homogeneous medium and a system of coupled waveguides

An analysis is made of the experimental investigations of the surface waves existing at the interface between a homogeneous medium and a periodically stratified medium that represents a bounded system of coupled waveguides. It is shown that, in all cases of the observation of surface waves, the bounded system of coupled waveguides has its own spectrum of guided modes and a spectrum of leaky modes that become surface waves of the system. It is also demonstrated that a biosensor can successfully operate when two surface waves serve as leaky modes of a Bragg waveguide in which the periodic system of waveguides is used as a distributed Bragg mirror of this waveguide. A structure supporting surface waves is designed on the basis of ten pairs of Nb2O5-SiO2 layers and implemented experimentally. The surface waves are detected with a K8 glass prism according to the Kretschmann scheme.