Landau damping of surface plasmons in metal nanostructures

Tigran V. Shahbazyan

Published 2016-11-26Version 1

We develop a quantum-mechanical theory for Landau damping of surface plasmons in arbitrary shape metallic structures that are larger that the characteristic length for nonlocal effects. We obtain an explicit expression for the electron surface scattering rate, which can be incorporated, in a natural way, in the metal dielectric function on par with bulk phonon and impurity scattering. We show that this rate depends sensitively on the local field polarization relative to the metal-dielectric interface, and obtain analytical results for several common nanostructures that so far eluded any attempts of quantum-mechanical evaluation. Our theory can be used for evaluation of plasmon-enhanced hot carrier generation rates in photovoltaics and photochemistry applications.