Localized surface plasmon resonance of degenerate semiconducting nanocrystal ensembles with various shape distributions

ABSTRACT Nanocrystals of degenerate semiconductors come in a variety of shapes, which have profound inuence on thelocalized surface plasmons which are supported. Ensembles of such nanocrystals are never perfect and willalways show a distribution of shapes. By embedding the Drude model into Mie scattering theory, the e ect ofthe shape inhomogeneity on the absorbance spectrum of a nanocrystal ensemble can be approximated for a fewcommon cases such as nanorods and nanodiscs as well as general ellipsoids. Using various distributions of aspectratios, broadening and shifting of the various plasmonic absorption peaks is observed for nanorod and nanodiscensembles. Similar behavior is also observed for ensembles of nearly spherical nanocrystals, which emphasizesthe importance of accounting for nanocrystal shape inhomogeneity when investigating broadening mechanismsof nanocrystal plasmonic absorbance.Keywords: localized surface plasmons, semiconductor nanocrystals, Drude Model, Mie-Gans Theory, ab-sorbance