Tomography of particle plasmon fields from electron energy loss spectroscopy

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that electron energy loss spectroscopy (EELS) can be used as a tomography tool to reconstruct three-dimensional plasmon fields in metallic nanoparticles, advancing quantitative plasmonics analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a theoretical framework that reinterprets EELS as a tomography problem for 3D plasmon field reconstruction using eigenmode expansion.

Findings

EELS can be used for 3D plasmon field tomography

Reconstruction of plasmon fields from rotated EELS maps is feasible

Establishes EELS as a quantitative tool for plasmonics

Abstract

We theoretically investigate electron energy loss spectroscopy (EELS) of metallic nanoparticles in the optical frequency domain. Using a quasistatic approximation scheme together with a plasmon eigenmode expansion, we show that EELS can be rephrased in terms of a tomography problem. For selected single and coupled nanoparticles we extract the three-dimensional plasmon fields from a collection of rotated EELS maps. Our results pave the way for a fully three-dimensional plasmon-field tomography and establish EELS as a quantitative measurement device for plasmonics.