I am completely confused, because after digging into papers I noticed that except for nowadays popular Surface Plasmon Polaritons (SPP), researchers mention more kinds of EM waves confined at the metallic surface.
First: Am I right that in the1960s-1980s people were calling SPP as "Surface Electromagnetic Waves" (SEW)? There's no difference between SPP and SEW?
Second: In the paper linked below, on page 225 there are mentioned Plane Electromagnetic Waves (PEW), that can be excited along with SPP.
Article Surface Infrared Spectroscopy
Third: "Perfectly Absorbing Modes" that are described in the paper below. They can also be excited in the conditions that are usually used for SPP.
https://www.nature.com/articles/srep09929
Fourth: The recent paper claims that there are three different regimes in which light couples into metal surface in Kretschmann configuration.
Article Kretschmann-Raether configuration: Revision of the theory of...
But when I read most of the modern papers that involve Kretschmann configuration for SPP excitation, noone mentiones anything except for SPP.
In the end I have no idea what were people really exciting in experiments with Kretschmann configuration for all those years. And are there more types of surface electromagnetic waves?
Surface electromagnetic waves arise at the interface of two media, one of which has negative dielectric function and the other has a positive, usually low, dielectric function, Metal-vacuum interface provides this condition, but there are other possibilities. For example layered media do not allow propagation of light in Bragg conditions. Ionic crystals have a region of negative epsilon. So, this term (SEW) is more general than the surface plasmon.
Look for example atArticle Surface Electromagnetic Waves in Quasiperiodic Superlattices
Surface plasmon polaritons and surface waves are not the same. Surface waves are the waves, which exist on irregular surface independently on the properties of substrate and they are not resonant in general case, while surface plasmon polariton are associated with the properties of the substrate .
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