Designing the plasmonic response of nanoparticles

I provide an overview of recent research activities in the study of plasmonic optical properties of metal nanostructures with emphasis on understanding the relationship between shape, size, environment, and optical response of individual and arrays of metal nanoparticles. A spectral representation formalism in the quasi-static limit is developed to study the optical response of nanoparticles. The spectral representation allows us to analyze the optical response in terms of the interacting surface plasmons excited at the interfaces by separating the contributions of the geometry from those of the dielectric properties of each shell and surroundings. Neither numerical nor analytical methods can do this separation. These insights into the physical origin of the optical response are very useful for engineering systems with desired properties and potential applications. Here, we discuss recent results of the spectral representation for nested nanoparticles, vertical-stacked plasmonic lattices, and the near-field energy transfer between two nanoparticles by considering the coupling between all the thermal electric fields.