Steady State (CW) Plasmon Mode Visualization

New Feature
We recently released a new feature that allows you to create movies of CW field components from the visualizer.

1. Select the $$ E, H, \text{ or } P $$ result.
2. Visualize one of the components X, Y, or Z.
3. Open the figure settings and scroll to the bottom. Enable the “Phase shift animation”
4. Set the FPS frames per second, and frames per cycle, I find that 32 frames per cycle and 25 fps works well.
5. Export as an .mpeg or .avi movie.

The vast majority of devices are passive and meant to operate in Steady-State. Such devices are examples of Linear Time Invariant systems, and it is sufficient to simulate the transient response of such systems to completely characterize the frequency response. FDTD does this very efficiently, and without approximations, allowing one to export the frequency dependent S-parameter for further circuit simulations. From a data analysis standpoint this is enough, but it is also important to communicate your ideas, and build intuition. These CW plots do precisely that which make them an interesting feature that I believe many users will enjoy working with.

Previously this was only possible through a mutli-step process using MATLAB. Now it is trivial to do from the visualizer.Effectively the field components are multiplied by a complex phase factor in each frame. This is an accurate depiction of the CW response provided the Fourier Transform is valid.

Example
In the AppGallery example Plasmon Mode Excitation they demonstrate how to excite the plasmon modes of an Au nanoparticle dimer.

Referring to [1] they lead off by stating

The plasmon hybridization model of electromagnetic coupling between plasmonic nanoparticles predicts the formation of lower energy “bonding” and higher energy “antibonding” modes in analogy with the quantum mechanical description of chemical bonding

These dark modes do not radiate very efficiently nor are they readily excited by normal light. The dipole moments of these plasmon modes cancel out due to their anti-bonding characteristics. Bonding, or bright, modes correspond to modes that can be easily excited by linearly polarized light as the dipoles oscillate in phase. This is all very interesting, but wouldn’t it be nice to quickly visualize these dark modes?

Figures

References

1. Dark Plasmon Modes in Symmetric Gold Nanoparticle Dimers Illuminated by Focused Cylindrical Vector Beams . J. Phys. Chem. C 2018, 122, 48, 27662-27672