Substrate influence on the plasmonic response of clusters of spherical nanoparticles

TL;DR

This paper introduces a numerical method to analyze how substrates affect the plasmonic response of spherical nanoparticle clusters, enabling detailed simulations of various configurations in the quasi-static limit.

Contribution

A new real space numerical algorithm that models substrate effects on the plasmonic response of spherical nanoparticle collections in the quasi-static regime.

Findings

Substrate significantly influences nanoparticle plasmonic behavior.

The method effectively models different material and substrate combinations.

Numerical results reveal substrate-induced shifts in plasmonic resonances.

Abstract

The plasmonic response of nanoparticles is exploited in many subfields of science and engineering to enhance optical signals associated with probes of nanoscale and subnanoscale entities. We develop a numerical algorithm based on previous theoretical work that addresses the influence of a substrate on the plasmonic response of collections of nanoparticles of spherical shape. Our method is a real space approach within the quasi-static limit that can be applied to a wide range of structures. We illustrate the role of the substrate through numerical calculations that explore single nanospheres and nanosphere dimers fabricated from either a Drude model metal or from silver on dielectric substrates, and from dielectric spheres on silver substrates.