Simulation study of electron beam induced surface plasmon excitation at nanoparticles

2018 
Phenomenon of localized surface plasmon excitation at nanostructured materials has attracted much attention in recent decades for their wide applications in single molecule detection, surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy and nano-plasmonics. In addition to the excitation by external light field, an electron beam can also induce the local surface plasmon excitation. Nowadays, electron energy loss spectroscopy (EELS) technique has been increasingly employed in experiment to investigate the surface excitation characteristics of metallic nanoparticles. However, a present theoretical analysis tool for electromagnetic analysis based on the discrete dipole approximation (DDA) method can only treat the case of excitation by light field. In this work we extend the DDA method for the calculation of EELS spectrum for arbitary nanostructured materials. We have simulated EELS spectra for different incident locations of an electron beam on a single silver nanoparticle, the simulated results agree with an experimental measurement very well. The present method then provides a computation tool for study of the local surface plasmon excitation of metallic nanoparticles induced by an electron beam.
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