Friction of the surface plasmon by high-energy particle-hole pairs: Are memory effects important?

Abstract

We show that the dynamics of the surface plasmon in metallic nanoparticles damped by its interaction with particle-hole excitations can be modelled by a single degree of freedom coupled to an environment. In this approach, the fast decrease of the dipole matrix elements that couple the plasmon to particle-hole pairs with the energy of the excitation allows a separation of the Hilbert space into low- and high-energy subspaces at a characteristic energy that we estimate. A picture of the spectrum consisting of a collective excitation built from low-energy excitations which interacts with high-energy particle-hole states can be formalised. The high-energy excitations yield an approximate description of a dissipative environment (or "bath") within a finite confined system. Estimates for the relevant timescales establish the Markovian character of the bath dynamics with respect to the surface plasmon evolution for nanoparticles with a radius larger than about 1 nm.

8 pages, 1 figure; see also cond-mat/0703721

References in corpus (5)

• Surface plasmon in metallic nanoparticles: renormalization effects due to electron-hole excitations
• Lifetime of the first and second collective excitations in metallic nanoparticles
• Quantum memory effects on the dynamics of electrons in small gold clusters
• Electronic lifetimes in ballistic quantum dots electrostatically coupled to metallic environments
• Anomaly in the relaxation dynamics close to the surface plasmon resonance

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Dirac-like plasmons in honeycomb lattices of metallic nanoparticles
• Lifetime of the surface magnetoplasmons in metallic nanoparticles
• Nonradiative limitations to plasmon propagation in chains of metallic nanoparticles
• Decay of dark and bright plasmonic modes in a metallic nanoparticle dimer
• Plasmons in two-dimensional lattices of near-field coupled nanoparticles