Plasmonic modes of polygonal particles calculated using a quantum hydrodynamics method

TL;DR

This paper investigates the plasmonic modes of polygonal nanoparticles using a quantum hydrodynamics approach, revealing edge, face, and hybrid modes and their dependence on shape, size, and charging effects.

Contribution

It introduces a quantum hydrodynamics method to analyze plasmonic responses of polygonal particles, capturing hybrid modes not present in classical models.

Findings

Edge modes localize charges at edges

Face modes localize charges at faces

Hybrid modes distribute charges evenly

Abstract

Plasmonic resonances of nanoparticles have drawn lots of attentions due to their interesting and useful properties such as strong field enhancements. These systems are typically studied using either classical electrodynamics or fully quantum theory. Each approach can handle some aspects of plasmonic systems accurately and efficiently, while having its own limitation. The self-consistent hydrodynamics model has the advantage that it can incorporate the quantum effect of the electron gas into classical electrodynamics in a consistent way. We use the method to study the plasmonic response of polygonal particles under the influence of an external electromagnetic wave, and we pay particular attention to the size and shape of the particle and the effect of charging. We find that the particles support edge modes, face modes and hybrid modes. The charges induced by the external field in the edge (face) modes mainly localize at the edges (faces), while the induced charges in the hybrid modes are distributed nearly evenly in both the edges and faces. The edge modes are less sensitive to particle size than the face modes, but are sensitive to the corner angles of the edges. When the number of sides of regular polygons increases, the edge and face modes gradually change into the classical dipole plasmonic mode of a cylinder. The hybrid modes are found to be the precursor of the Bennett mode, which cannot be found in classical electrodynamics.