Unified Treatment for Scattering and Photoluminescence Properties of Strongly Coupled Metallic Nanoparticle Chains based on a Coupling Classic Harmonic Oscillator Model

TL;DR

This paper introduces a simple harmonic oscillator model to unify the understanding of scattering and photoluminescence in metallic nanoparticle chains, matching experimental results and analyzing effects of particle number and coupling.

Contribution

A unified harmonic oscillator model is proposed to analyze scattering and PL properties of metallic nanoparticle chains, demonstrating good agreement with experiments.

Findings

Larger n or g causes red-shift and narrower FWHM in scattering spectra.

PL mode splitting increases with coupling strength g.

Amplitudes of PL modes depend on excitation wavelength.

Abstract

We present a multimer coupling classic harmonic oscillator model to reveal the scattering and photoluminescence (PL) properties of metallic nanoparticle chains. Taking particle number from 1 to 6 as examples, we compare the calculated spectra with the experimental ones from other researchers' work, and they agree well with each other. Furthermore, scattering and PL properties are analyzed carefully varying with particle number $n$, coupling strength $g$ and effective free electron number $N$. Results indicates larger red-shift and smaller full width at half maximum (FWHM) of the scattering spectra with larger $n$ or/and larger $g$. Meanwhile, the splitting of PL modes increases as $g$ increases, and the amplitudes are dependent on the excitation wavelength. This classic model is simple and shows a unified treatment for understanding the scattering and PL properties of multimer coupled systems.