Comparison of near- and far-field measures for plasmon resonance of metallic nanoparticles

With a systematic comparison of the near- and far-field measures of plasmon resonance, we show that significant differences arise between the measures for both gold and silver spherical particles. The difference of the peak wavelengths between the near- and far-field measures increases with increasing particle size, reaching over 200 nm for a particle radius of 100 nm for both gold and silver. We physically explain these results by applying radiation damping to the quasi-static approximation, and we provide simple phenomenonological fits, which readily convert between the peak wavelengths for each measure. We expect that taking into account these differences can provide improvement in understanding and optimizing surface-enhanced spectroscopies. (C) 2009 Optical Society of America