Studying polaritons in low symmetry materials through attenuated total reflectance (ATR) spectroscopy

This comprehensive document explores the polaritons in low-symmetry anisotropic materials, and the methods developed to study them. We use Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) reflectance spectroscopy to study the infrared optical phonons of the monoclinic crystals BiBO and bGO, and FTIR attenuated total reflectance (ATR) spectroscopy to induce surface phonon polaritons within the materials. Utilizing our reflectance spectroscopy we create an optical model for BiBO and obtain its dielectric function tensor. From the dielectric function tensor we simulate light propagation to characterize the surface phonon polaritons.