Nano-corrugation induced forces between electrically neutral plasmonic objects

Abstract

Recent advances in nanotechnology have created tremendous excitement across different disciplines but in order to fully control and manipulate nano-scale objects, we must understand the forces at work at the nano-scale, which can be very different from those that dominate the macro-scale. We show that there is a new kind of curvature-induced force that acts between nano-corrugated electrically neutral plasmonic surfaces. Absent in flat surfaces, such a force owes its existence entirely to geometric curvature, and originates from the kinetic energy associated with the electron density which tends to make the profile of the electron density smoother than that of the ionic background and hence induces curvature-induced local charges. Such a force cannot be found using standard classical electromagnetic approaches, and we use a self-consistent hydrodynamics model as well as first principles density functional calculations to explore the character of such forces. These two methods give qualitative similar results. We found that the force can be attractive or repulsive, depending on the details of the nano-corrugation, and its magnitude is comparable to light induced forces acting on plasmonic nano-objects.

30 pages, 7 figures

References in corpus (14)

• Resonance shifts and spill-out effects in self-consistent hydrodynamic nanoplasmonics
• Repulsive Casimir Force in Chiral Metamaterials
• Quantum Hydrodynamic Theory for Plasmonics: Impact of the Electron Density Tail
• Casimir repulsion between metallic objects in vacuum
• Casimir forces on a silicon micromechanical chip
• Measurement of non-monotonic Casimir forces between silicon nanostructures
• Surface Contact Potential Patches and Casimir Force Measurements
• Non-touching nanoparticle diclusters bound by repulsive and attractive Casimir forces
• Casimir repulsion and metamaterials
• Repulsive, nonmonotonic Casimir forces in a glide-symmetric geometry
• Surface plasmon resonance spectroscopy of single bowtie nano-antennas using a differential reflectivity method
• Strong light-induced negative optical pressure arising from the kinetic energy of conduction electrons in plasmonic cavities
• Plasmonic modes of polygonal particles calculated using a quantum hydrodynamics method
• Optical forces, torques and force densities calculated at a microscopic level using a self-consistent hydrodynamics method