Rigorous Coupled Wave Analysis for Plasmonic Nanoparticles

Electromagnetic simulation packages for nanoparticles have become of interest for science and engineering community because of interesting properties of nanomaterials, such as, plasmonics and localized field enhancement. There are several approaches to calculate electromagnetic wave responses including time domain and frequency domain; each approach does have its own pros and cons. In this paper, we discuss basic principle of Rigorous coupled wave analysis (RCWA) and some key issues of 2D Rigorous Coupled Wave Analysis (RCWA) for nanoparticle simulation, such as, the computing demands (long computation time and memory consumption) and staircase approximation. We also suggest some feasible approaches to get around the issues and speed up the calculation, such as, employing Li Feng Li’s RCWA algorithm for circular and elliptical rods, making use of the symmetry of spherical shape particles to reduce redundancies in computation and building up an Eigenvector/Eigenvalue database of difference radii of disks, so that these disks can be stacked together to form various sizes of nanospheres.