Impact of electric quadrupolar coupling on the optical response of an array of nano-objects

Abstract

Intra- and inter-particle coupling effects are important but have not been properly taken into account in modeling the optical response of an array of nano-objects. In this paper, we present a method to analyze the impact of electric quadrupolar coupling on the optical response of a layer of silver nanorods fabricated with oblique-angle deposition (OAD). Our technique can render the non-locally coupled nano-objects into an array of coarse-grained induced charges. The retrieved polarizability tensor of the silver nanorods exhibits non-zero off-diagonal components, revealing information about the array structure and inter-particle quadrupolar couplings. Thus, a more transparent picture of the correlation between the function and structure of an optical metamaterial can be yielded.