Applicability of multipole decomposition to plasmonic- and dielectric-lattice resonances

Abstract

Periodic nanoparticle arrays have attracted considerable interest recently since the lattice effect can lead to spectrally narrow resonances and tune the resonance position in a broad range. Multipole decomposition is widely used to analyze the role of the multipoles in the resonance excitations, radiation, and scattering of electromagnetic waves. However, previous studies have not addressed the validity and accuracy of the multipole decomposition around the lattice resonance. The applicability of the exact multipole decomposition based on spherical harmonics expansion has not been demonstrated around the lattice resonance with the strong multipole coupling. This work studies the two-dimensional periodic arrays of both plasmonic and dielectric nanospheres and compares the multipole decomposition results with the analytic ones around their lattice resonances. We study both the effective polarizabilities of multipoles and the scattering spectra of the structures. The analytical results are calculated from the coupled dipole–quadrupole model. This study demonstrates that the exact multipole decomposition agrees well with the numerical simulation around lattice resonances. Only a small number of multipoles are required to represent the results accurately.