Surface integral formulation for 3D simulations of plasmonic and high permittivity nanostructures

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. (C) 2009 Optical Society of America