We studied the far-field optical reflection contrast spectroscopy (FORCS) properties of the following system: individual Au nanospheres (radius R) immobilized above Si substrate with different thicknesses (d) SiO 2 between them. We found that peaks in the FORCS red-shift exponentially with d decreasing. The near-field coupling between the Au nanosphere and its supporting substrate is revealed to contribute to this, while the coupling strength is demonstrated to decrease exponentially with a decay length of 0.30 in units of d/R. It qualitatively agrees well in magnitude with the near-field coupling between two noble metal nanoparticles consisting of a dimer. Our results demonstrate that the FORCS can provide insight into the near-field coupling, which is significant for their applications in nano-photonics, sensing, surfaceenhanced spectrascopies, etc.

In this paper, a lattice dynamics method, named M-K matrix method, is proposed to investigate the near-field resonance response of a plasmonic metamaterial lattice under an oblique incident field with an arbitrary incident angle. By considering the electric, magnetic and field-dipole interactions, we construct a dissipative many-body Lagrange model for a reference lattice. A collective forced vibration equation, with the degree of freedom equals to the number of nanoparticles in a cell, is introduced to describe the lattice resonance under a polarized field. The resonance frequencies can be conveniently obtained from the poles of transfer function matrix. Based on this elegant matrix differential equation, one can calculate the amplitude-frequency and phase-frequency responses of plasmonic lattice, and analysis the normal modes from dispersion relations. The analytical results, which are from three examples: simple square lattice, binary chain and chessboard lattice, are perfectly matched with numerical simulations in a large frequency band, proving it to be an effective tool to calculate the dynamic response of plasmonic lattice.

In this paper, site preference, phase stability and elastic parameters of MoSi2 for Al and Nb addition are studied using first-principles calculation. The results show that alloying elements can cause MoSi2 to change from C11b to C40 phase and the phase transition is due to the activated 1/2[[Formula: see text]11](110) slip system for C11b. [Formula: see text] ratio reveals that the ductility is enhanced after phase transition. Ductile factor [Formula: see text] based on competitive processes between micro-crack opening and dislocations emission is defined to assess the ductility of MoSi2. Interestingly, the increased ductility is due to the activated dislocation emission but suppressed crack propagation. Finally, charge density and DOS indicate that the improved ductility is due to the weakened Mo-4d and Si-3p covalent interactions.

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