On Damping of Plasmons and Plasmon-Polaritons in Metallic Nanostructures and Its Influence onto Numerical Simulations

Abstract

AbstractWe show that the damping of plasmons in metallic nanoparticles highly exceeds that caused by scattering of electrons on defects, phonons, and other electrons and on boundaries of particles. The radiation losses in far-field zone due to the Lorentz friction is especially high at nanometre scale of metal confinement (e.g. attains the maximum at ca. 100 nm diameter of particle, Au in vacuum). This causes a different e-m response of such size structures in comparison to conventional solution of Maxwell-Fresnel equations using the bulk dielectric function for metal. The strong discrepancy occurs also if plasmons are coupled in near-field zone to nearby-located absorbing medium, e.g. semiconductor substrate. This coupling cannot be accounted for by classical electrodynamic treatment (e.g. by numerical solution of Maxwell equations by finite element method for differential equation solution) and needs the application of quantum Fermi golden rule to estimate plasmon damping and related modifications of dielectric functions both of metallic nanoparticles and of absorbing medium. Similarly, the perfect cancellation of radiative losses of plasmon-polaritons in metallic nano-chains is beyond classical Maxwell equation modelling, as it reveals the perfect vanishing of Lorentz friction losses in chain segments by radiative contribution from other segments in near-, medium- and far-field zones. This demonstrates that nano-plasmonic effects cannot be reliably numerically modelled using material parameters from conventional packets referred to optical constants measured in bulk.