Real-time dynamics of plasmonic resonances in nanoparticles described by a boundary element method with generic dielectric function.

Abstract

Investigating nanoplasmonics in an explicit time-dependent perspective is a natural choice when light pulses are used and may also reveal aspects that are hidden in a frequency-based picture. In the past, we proposed a method time domain-boundary element method (TD-BEM) to simulate the time dependent polarization of nanoparticles based on a boundary element method that is particularly suitable to interface with a quantum atomistic description of nearby molecules. So far, however, metal dielectric functions in TD-BEM have been modeled through analytic expressions, such as those of Debye and Drude-Lorentz, which cannot account for multiple electronic resonances. Our approach allows us to include in the TD-BEM framework also the description of metals with complicate dielectric function profiles in the frequency domain. Particularly, among all metals, gold is a challenging case due to the presence of many transition frequencies. We applied our methods to different metals (gold, silver, and the less commonly investigated rhodium) and different shaped nanoparticles (spheres, ellipsoids, and cubes), the approach has been tested comparing TD-BEM and frequency domain BEM absorption spectra, and it has been used to investigate the time-dependent field acting locally close to nanoparticle vertices.