Recent research results from DTU Fotonik’s Structures Electromagnetic Materials group and their colleagues from Center for Nanostructured Graphene (CNG) were featured at Nanometa 2013, and the work has stimulated considerable interest with calls to present the work as invited talks at both META’13, SPP6, and PIERS 2013.
The work is entitled “Blueshift of the surface plasmon resonance in silver nanoparticles studied with EELS” and the researchers used state-of-the-art electron-energy loss spectroscopy (EELS) to study the confinement of plasmons in nanoscale silver particles where quantum properties and nonlocal response of the plasma are anticipated to become important. Larger particles (>25 nm) exhibit classical dynamics, while the smallest particles (~3.5 nm) show significant resonant blue shifts of 0.5 eV. This observation cannot be explained by classical local-response theory, thus providing intriguing evidence for the importance of quantum effects and nonlocal dynamics in light-matter interactions at the nanoscale. The paper has been published in the recently launched high-impact journal Nanophotonics.