Abstract

Surface plasmon excitation in small metal particles has found great interest in the past, in particular since this collective oscillation of the conduction electrons can be stimulated with light and since its resonance frequency can be tuned over a wide spectral range by varying the size and shape of the clusters, by changing the dielectric surrounding and choosing different metals. Even though numerous investigations on SP's have been reported, no systematic investigation of the decay time T₂ and the decay mechanisms of SP excitation are available. Main reason is that nanoparticles usually have a broad size and shape distribution which introduces inhomogeneous line broadening and prevents the determination of T₂ by linear optical spectroscopy and time resolved experiments using femtosecond laser pulses [1,2].

© 2000 IEEE