Modeling Plasmonic Interference in Scanning Near-field Optical Microscopy

Plasmonics is one of the most exciting and rapidly developing fields in the broad category of nanostructure engineering and plasmon polaritons offer a unique window into physics occurring at the nanoscale. As such, the ability to analytically predict and simulate both the dispersion and real-space propagation of plasmons in materials and fabricated nanostructures is of great interest to condensed matter physicists. There have recently been important strides in the field of simulating the aforementioned dispersion using the near-field response of materials [1] as well as the optical constants of the layers of layered heterostructures [2] to construct their P-polarized reflectivity and, consequently, the plasmonic dispersion relation. Here, we present a computationally efficient implementation of a generalized spectral method [3] for the simulation of the real-space propagation and interference of plasmons in the near-field for a material or heterostructure with a given set of optical constants and geometry.

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