Optical response of strongly coupled metal nanoparticles in dimer arrays

The optical responses of structured array of noble-metal nanoparticle dimers immersed in a glass matrix are investigated theoretically, motivated by the recent experimental observation of the splitting of the surface plasmon bands in silver arrays. To capture the strong electromagnetic coupling between the two approaching particles in a silver dimer, the spectral representation of the multiple image formula has been used, and a semiclassical description of the silver dielectric function is adopted from the literature. The splitting of plasmon resonance band of the incident longitudinal and transverse polarized light is found to be strongly dependent on the particle diameter and their separation. Our results are shown to be in accord with the recent experimental observation. Moreover, a large redshift for the longitudinal polarization can be reproduced. The reflectivity spectrum is further calculated for a dilute suspension of dimer arrays.