Research reports

Plasmonic interaction between nanospheres

by S. Yu and H. Ammari

(Report number 2016-20)

Abstract
When metallic nanospheres are nearly touching, strong nanofocusing of light can occur due to highly localized surface plasmons. It has potential applications in the design of nanophotonic integrated circuits, biosensing, and spectroscopy. Due to the singular behavior of electromagnetic field in the narrow gap region, its analytical investigation is quite challenging. Moreover, it requires extremely large numerical cost for computing the field accurately. There are two approaches for studying the interaction between metallic spheres: transformation optics and the method of image charges. Here we clarify the connection between them. Based on the connection formula, we reveal the singular nature of plasmonic interaction between nanospheres in a completely analytical way. We also develop a hybrid numerical scheme for accurately and efficiently computing the field distribution produced by an arbitrary number of nearly touching plasmonic spheres.

Keywords: nearly touching plasmonic nanoparticles, transformation optics, method of image charges, hybrid numerical scheme.

BibTeX
@Techreport{YA16_657,
  author = {S. Yu and H. Ammari},
  title = {Plasmonic interaction between nanospheres},
  institution = {Seminar for Applied Mathematics, ETH Z{\"u}rich},
  number = {2016-20},
  address = {Switzerland},
  url = {https://www.sam.math.ethz.ch/sam_reports/reports_final/reports2016/2016-20.pdf },
  year = {2016}
}

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