Designing plasmonic systems: Applications to dark modes in nanoparticle pairs and triplets

Abstract

The design of structures capable of producing strong electric near-fields has become an active area of plasmonics research with applications including sensor technology, surface enhanced Raman scattering and plasmon solar cells. The purposeful design of plasmonic systems is complicated by the problem of finding analytical solutions to Maxwell's equations. Recently we developed a theory, based on a simplification of the boundary element method (BEM), for modeling the interaction between plasmonic nanoparticles mediated by their evanescent electric fields. The theory makes extensive use of "electrostatic" resonances in which the nanoparticle system is taken to be much smaller than the waveleng..