NanoMeta2013 Day1

From today on, I have been in the conference NanoMeta2013 which is organized of European Physics Society. (it is quite interesting when I see the poster in front of the congress that the EPS is a 'Grass Root' organisation. the 'Grass Root', 草根 in Chinese, simply meaning ordinary people who do not claim superior power, etc. but gathering together can make an important influence on this society.)

The Conference is kicked off by a plenary talk by Uwe Kreibig on extensions of Mie theory due to Mie's incapability to explain many of the experiments in the area of nano-plasmonics. To Uwe, the field of 'plasmonics' is not new at all.  Many of the Mie's problem lie in the fact that Mie has adopted bulk permittivity of the material for the sphere, actually the spherical surface has a strong influence on the electronic response which can not be exactly described by the bulk. 
He is the author of a book:

Optical Properties of Metal Clusters. 

The section 'Quantum Plasmonics' in the morning leads to a strong debate on the methods of modelling sub-nm plasmonic gaps. The 'Quantum' plasmonics is mainly explaining the plasmonic effects by Quantum Mechanics. Classical electromagnetic theory by using bulk properties of materials will predict infinite field enhancement for a infinitesimal metallic tip, but from quantum physics, we can know this can not be true since the Pauli exclusion principle of the electrons. This is effect is need to take into consideration when tip/gap is below 1 nm. 

 Stephen Maier presented the non-locality theory for sub-nm tips. The non-locality theory is quite popular in recent years, and have been used in publications of F. Javier García de Abajo, D.R. Smith, S.A. Maier, et al.. The basic idea behind it is to introduce an 'electronic friction' in describing the collective oscillation of the electrons. 

Javier Aizpurua claims today that we should be cautious in applying the 'hydrodynamic' model of the electrons, since it has a failure history in describing previous surface physics, and will possibly result in the same consequence in describing closed surfaces- the area of plasmonics.  Javier and his collegues has developed an alternative method-- 'Time-dependent density functional theory', which originates from quantum theory.

I have expected more on Stephen Maier's presentation about broadband plasmonic antennas for SEIRS, but unfortunately he didn't go very deep into this part.

The talk of Frank Neubrech is quite nice as well.