Recent experiments with film-coupled nanoparticles suggest that the impact of spatial dispersion is enhanced in plasmonic structures where high wavevector guided modes are excited. More advanced descriptions of the optical response of metals than Drude's are thus probably necessary in plasmonics. We show that even in classical prism coupler experiments, the plasmonic enhancement of spatial dispersion can be leveraged to make such experiments two orders of magnitude more sensitive. The realistic multilayered structures involved rely on layers that are thick enough to rule our any other phenomenon as the spill-out. Optical evanescent excitation of plasmonic waveguides using prism couplers thus constitutes an ideal platform to study spatial dispersion. * antoine.moreau@uca.fr 1 P. Drude, Annalen der Physik 306, 566 (1900).

Recent experiments have shown that spatial dispersion may have a conspicuous impact on the response of plasmonic structures. This suggests that in some cases the Drude model should be replaced by more advanced descriptions that take spatial dispersion into account, like the hydrodynamic model. Here we show that nonlocality in the metallic response affects surface plasmons propagating at the interface between a metal and a dielectric with high permittivity. As a direct consequence, any nanoparticle with a radius larger than 20 nm can be expected to be sensitive to spatial dispersion whatever its size. The same behavior is expected for a simple metallic grating allowing the excitation of surface plasmons, just as in Woods famous experiment. Finally, we carefully set up a procedure to measure the signature of spatial dispersion precisely, leading the way for future experiments. Importantly, our work suggests that for any plasmonic structure in a high permittivity dielectric, nonlocality should be taken into account.