Theory and Modeling of Plasmonic Nanostructures

Dear Colleagues,

The study of plasmonic nanostructures dates back to the 1850s, with Faraday’s investigations of the optical properties of colloidal gold nanoparticle solutions. Today, it is well understood that the excitation of surface plasmons, or collective oscillations of conducting electrons at the surface of a metal, can lead to unique optical properties, including enhanced absorption and scattering and the sub-wavelength confinement and propagation of electromagnetic energy. Despite their long history, plasmonic nanostructures continue to be of considerable interest, especially in recent decades as significant advances in synthesis and nanolithography techniques and characterization methods permit nanostructures with precise shapes and sizes and tunable optical properties.

The advent of modern high-performance computing has enabled the fundamental study of the optical properties of plasmonic nanostructures with arbitrary shapes and material composition with high spatial and temporal resolution. Classical electrodynamics methods, such as Mie theory, discrete dipole approximation (DDA), finite-difference time-domain (FDTD), finite element methods (FEM), etc., which solve Maxwell’s equations for electromagnetic field components and employ bulk dielectric constants to model dispersive metals, can be highly accurate for nanostructures with features larger than the mean free path of the electron. Advances in electronic structure methods, such as time-dependent density functional theory (TD-DFT) or hybrid quantum mechanics/molecular mechanics methods (QM/MM), now provide a way to study electronic transitions and transport in nanometer and sub-nanometer metallic clusters from first principles.

This Special Issue aims to feature recent progress in, and the impact of, the theoretical and computational modeling of plasmonic nanostructures for applications in catalysis, optoelectronics, photovoltaics, chemical and biological sensing, spectroscopy, nonlinear optics, metamaterials, medical imaging and therapeutics, etc. We invite full papers, communications and reviews related to one or several of the topics included in the keywords below.

Assoc. Prof. Jason M. Montgomery
Guest Editor

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