Modeling anisotropic plasmon excitations in self-assembled fullerenes

Abstract

The plasmon excitations in Coulomb-coupled spherical two-dimensional electron gases (S2DEGs) reveal an interesting dependence on the displacement vector between the centers of the spheres with respect to the axis of quantization for the angular momentum quantum number L. Specifically, plasmon modes for a bundle of three S2DEGs have been obtained within the random-phase approximation (RPA). The inter-sphere Coulomb interaction matrix elements and their symmetry properties were also investigated in detail. The case of a bundle gives an adequate picture of the way in which the Coulomb interaction depends on the orbital angular momentum quantum number L and its projection M. We concluded that the interaction between the S2DEGs aligned at an angle of 45o with the axis of quantization is negligible compared to the interaction along and perpendicular to the quantization axis, which are themselves unequal to each other. Consequently, the plasmon excitation frequencies reveal an interesting orientational anisotropic coupling to an external electromagnetic field probing the charge density oscillations. Our result on the spatial correlation may be experimentally observable. In this connection, there have already been some experimental reports pointing to a similar effect in nanoparticles