The resonant dynamics of arbitrarily-shaped meta-atoms

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method to directly compute the resonant modes of arbitrarily-shaped nano-structures from Maxwell's equations, enabling accurate modeling of their electromagnetic response across broad bandwidths.

Contribution

It presents a novel integral equation approach to determine complex resonant modes of open, lossy systems, facilitating physical interpretation and numerical modeling of complex meta-atoms.

Findings

Modes are computed directly from Maxwell's equations.

Models accurately predict scatterer responses over broad bandwidths.

Application to coupled split rings explains frequency-splitting and radiative losses.

Abstract

Meta-atoms, nano-antennas, plasmonic particles and other small scatterers are commonly modeled in terms of their modes. However these modal solutions are seldom determined explicitly, due to the conceptual and numerical difficulties in solving eigenvalue problems for open systems with strong radiative losses. Here these modes are directly calculated from Maxwell's equations expressed in integral operator form, by finding the complex frequencies which yield a homogenous solution. This gives a clear physical interpretation of the modes, and enables their conduction or polarization current distribution to be calculated numerically for particles of arbitrary shape. By combining the modal current distribution with a scalar impedance function, simple yet accurate models of scatterers are constructed which describe their response to an arbitrary incident field over a broad bandwidth. These models generalize both equivalent-dipole and and equivalent-circuit models to finite sized structures with multiple modes. They are applied here to explain the frequency-splitting for a pair of coupled split rings, and the accompanying change in radiative losses. The approach presented in this paper is made available in an open-source code.