title: Surface integral formulation for 3D simulations of plasmonic and high permittivity nanostructures.
abstract: Among the most popular approaches used for simulating plasmonic systems, the discrete dipole approximation suffers from poorly scaling volume discretization and limited near-field accuracy. We demonstrate that transformation to a surface integral formulation improves scalability and convergence and provides a flexible geometric approximation allowing, e.g., to investigate the influence of fabrication accuracy. The occurring integrals can be solved quasi-analytically, permitting even rapidly changing fields to be determined arbitrarily close to a scatterer. This insight into the extreme near-field behavior is useful for modeling closely packed particle ensembles and to study "hot spots" in plasmonic nanostructures used for plasmon-enhanced Raman scattering.
authors.affiliation: Nanophotonics and Metrology Laboratory, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland. andreas.kern@epfl.ch
authors.forename: Andreas M
authors.initials: AM
authors.lastname: Kern
authors.forename: Olivier J F
authors.initials: OJ
authors.lastname: Martin