Volume integral equation analysis of surface plasmon resonance of nanoparticles

Abstract

The interactions between electromagnetic field and arbitrarily shaped metallic nanoparticles are numerically investigated. The scattering and near field intensity of nanoparticles are characterized by using volume integral equation which is formulated by considering the total electric field, i.e. the sum of incident fields and radiated fields by equivalent electric volume currents, within the scatterers. The resultant volume integral equation is then discretized using divergence-conforming vector basis functions and is subsequently solved numerically. Numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the application of volume integral equation to capture and analyze the surface plasmon resonance of arbitrarily shaped metallic nanoparticles. The effects of illumination angles and background media to the surface plasmon resonance are also investigated. The results show that our proposed method is particularly useful and accurate in characterizing the surface plasmon properties of metallic nanoparticles.

Surface Plasmon Enhancement of Optical Absorption in Thin-Film Silicon Solar Cells

“…The most effective practical realization of this effect is through the excitation of localized surface plasmons [12][13][14], which are resonantly coupled to metallic nanoparticles and find numerous applications, including biosensors and bridging the nanoelectronics and microphotonic platforms in a single microchip [15,16]. The attractiveness of surface plasmon excitations for such applications also owes to the dependence of their resonant frequencies on the sizes, shapes, and mutual arrangements of the metal nanoparticles [17,18], which can be measured using optical extinction spectroscopy [19,20]. In addition, arrays of metallic nanoparticles used as nanoplasmonic resonantors can be synthesized using a variety of conventional deposition techniques similar to the ones used for solar cell manufacturing [15,21].…”

A volume integral equation method for periodic scattering problems for anisotropic Maxwell's equations

“…where ϕ j ∈ L 2 (Ω R ) 3 are the α-quasiperiodic basis functions from (11). Note that the union ∪ N ∈N T N is dense in H α,p (curl, Ω R ).…”

“…This fact is crucially exploited for fast methods for computing the discretized operator in (36). This transform F N maps point values of a trigonometric polynomial ϕ j (see (11)) to the Fourier coefficients of the polynomial. Now recall that α 1,j = j 1 + α 1 , α 2,j = j 2 + α 2 for j ∈ Z 3 .…”

“…Volume integral equations are a popular tool for numerically solving scattering problems in the engineering community, see, e.g., [4,6,11,22,28,35,41,42]. However, the discretization of the integral operator itself is sometimes done in a crude way, and a convergence analysis of the technique is often missing, in particular when material parameters are not globally smooth.…”

Surface plasmon enhanced light absorption for thin film poly-silicon solar cell with hybrid structure and metal alloy nano-particles

“…This overall cross section is contributed by the sum of all the normal modes of the NP having interaction with the incident light according to Mie theory [4]. This leads to enhanced electromagnetic field in the vicinity of the NP surface [5,6]. And the scattered light is efficiently coupled into waveguide modes of the active layer due to this near-field enhancement, results in increased optical path [7] and so thus the enhanced light absorption.…”