Polarizabilities of complex individual dielectric or plasmonic nanostructures

TL;DR

This paper introduces a universal method to extract polarizability tensors of small dielectric or plasmonic nanostructures, accounting for phase effects and enabling efficient modeling of complex metasurfaces.

Contribution

The authors develop a novel approach to accurately determine polarizability components, including phase effects, for small nanostructures, extending beyond conventional approximations.

Findings

The method accurately extracts response tensors for small particles.

It reveals limitations of conventional dipole approximations.

Pseudo-polarizabilities include phase effects for intermediate sizes.

Abstract

When the sizes of photonic nanoparticles are much smaller than the excitation wavelength, their optical response can be efficiently described with a series of polarizability tensors. Here, we propose a universal method to extract the different components of the response tensors associated with small plasmonic or dielectric particles. We demonstrate that the optical response can be faithfully approximated, as long as the effective dipole is not induced by retardation effects, hence do not depend on the phase of the illumination. We show that the conventional approximation breaks down for a phase-driven dipolar response, such as optical magnetic resonances in dielectric nanostructures. To describe such retardation induced dipole resonances in intermediate-size dielectric nanostructures, we introduce "pseudo-polarizabilities" including first-order phase effects, which we demonstrate at the example of magnetic dipole resonances in dielectric spheres and ellipsoids. Our method paves the way for fast simulations of large and inhomogeneous meta-surfaces.