Surface plasmon in metallic nanoparticles: renormalization effects due to electron-hole excitations

Abstract

The electronic environment causes decoherence and dissipation of the collective surface plasmon excitation in metallic nanoparticles. We show that the coupling to the electronic environment influences the width and the position of the surface plasmon resonance. A redshift with respect to the classical Mie frequency appears in addition to the one caused by the spill-out of the electronic density outside the nanoparticle. We characterize the spill-out effect by means of a semiclassical expansion and obtain its dependence on temperature and the size of the nanoparticle. We demonstrate that both, the spill-out and the environment-induced shift are necessary to explain the experimentally observed frequencies and confirm our findings by time-dependent local density approximation calculations of the resonance frequency. The size and temperature dependence of the environmental influence results in a qualitative agreement with pump-probe spectroscopic measurements of the differential light transmission.

15 pages, 8 figures; version accepted in PRB

References in corpus (5)

• Observation of intrinsic size effects in the optical response of individual gold nanoparticles
• Photothermal heterodyne imaging of individual nonfluorescent nanoclusters and nanocrystals
• Single metallic nanoparticle imaging for protein detection in cells
• Lifetime of the first and second collective excitations in metallic nanoparticles
• Oscillatory behavior and enhancement of the surface plasmon linewidth in embedded noble metal nanoparticles

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Spin-dependent dipole excitation in alkali-metal nanoparticles
• Anomaly in the relaxation dynamics close to the surface plasmon resonance