Excitation of Confined Bulk Plasmons in metallic nanoparticles by penetrating electron beams within a non-local analytical approach

TL;DR

This paper presents a non-local analytical model for electron energy loss in metallic nanoparticles, revealing size and impact parameter effects on confined bulk plasmon excitation, including blueshifts and threshold behaviors.

Contribution

It introduces a non-local hydrodynamic model to analytically describe confined bulk plasmon excitation by electron beams, capturing effects missed by local dielectric models.

Findings

Confined bulk plasmons exhibit size-dependent blueshifts.

A minimum impact parameter is required for efficient CBP excitation.

Higher-order CBPs are excited at larger impact parameters.

Abstract

Using a linear hydrodynamic model (HDM) we investigate theoretically the interaction between penetrating electron beams and sub-5 nm metallic spherical nanoparticles (NPs), and provide an analytical expression of the electron energy loss (EEL) probability including non-local effects in the response of the confined electron gas. We focus on the characterization of the longitudinal plasmon excitations, or confined bulk plasmons (CBPs), which cannot be addressed within local dielectric frameworks, and show that their excitation is highly sensitive to the impact parameter and kinetic energy of the incident electron beam, as well as to the NP's size. In contrast to the local approach, our decription captures a blueshift of the bulk plasmon envelope (BPE) with decreasing NP size and a blueshift with increasing impact parameter. Moreover, it predicts a threshold impact parameter, or minimum electron path inside the NP, to efficiently activate a set of CBPs. Exploiting the multipolar description of the CBPs we identify the underlying symmetry rules governing their excitation by electron beams, and correlate the observed blueshift of the BPE for increasing impact parameters with the excitation of higher-order CBPs. Dispersion of the CBPs with decreasing NP sizes further increases this impact parameter dependent blueshift of the BPE and also explains the decrease in the impact parameter threshold.