Nonlocal Hydrodynamic Models for the Optical Response of Plasmonic Nanostructures

In order to model the interaction between light and plasmonic structures at deep-nanometer scale, which is governed by non-classical effects, a nonlocal hydrodynamic approach has been extensively studied. Several hydrodynamic models have been proposed, solving the coupled equations: the linearized hydrodynamic equation of motion and the electrodynamic Maxwell’s equations, by employing additional boundary conditions. This work compares four hydrodynamic models: the hard wall hydrodynamic model (HW-HDM), the curl-free hydrodynamic model (CF-HDM), the shear forces hydrodynamic model (SF-HDM), and the quantum hydrodynamic model (Q-HDM). The analysis is conducted for a metallic spherical nanoparticle, as an example. The above hydrodynamic models are also compared with experiments available in literature. It is demonstrated that HW-HDM and QHDM outperform the other two hydrodynamic models.