Nanoplasmonic Renormalization and Enhancement of Coulomb Interactions

TL;DR

This paper develops a comprehensive theory for how surface plasmons in nanostructured metals can enhance and modify Coulomb interactions, impacting various many-body phenomena and applications like energy transfer and catalysis.

Contribution

It introduces a general theory for plasmonic enhancement of Coulomb interactions and explicitly computes the surface plasmon-dressed interaction for metal-dielectric nanoshells.

Findings

Derived a closed-form expression for plasmon-dressed Coulomb interaction.

Showed resonant behavior of the interaction in metal-dielectric nanoshells.

Applied the theory to describe enhanced energy transfer between quantum dots.

Abstract

Nanostructured plasmonic metal systems are known to enhance greatly variety of radiative and nonradiative optical processes, both linear and nonlinear, which are due to the interaction of an electron in a molecule or semiconductor with the enhanced local optical field of the surface plasmons. Principally different are numerous many-body phenomena that are due to the Coulomb interaction between charged particles: carriers (electrons and holes) and ions. These include carrier-carrier or carrier-ion scattering, energy and momentum transfer (including the drag effect), thermal equilibration, exciton formation, impact ionization, Auger effects, etc. It is not widely recognized that these and other many-body effects can also be modified and enhanced by the surface-plasmon local fields. A special but extremely important class of such many-body phenomena is constituted by chemical reactions at metal surfaces, including catalytic reactions. Here, we propose a general and powerful theory of the plasmonic enhancement of the many-body phenomena resulting in a closed expression for the surface plasmon-dressed Coulomb interaction. We illustrate this theory by computing this dressed interaction explicitly for an important example of metal-dielectric nanoshells, which exhibits a reach resonant behavior in both the magnitude and phase. This interaction is used to describe the nanoplasmonic-enhanced Foerster energy transfer between nanocrystal quantum dots in the proximity of a plasmonic nanoshell. Catalysis at nanostructured metal surfaces, nonlocal carrier scattering and surface-enhanced Raman scattering are discussed among other effects and applications where the nanoplasmonic renormalization of the Coulomb interaction may be of principal importance.