A DGTD method for the numerical modeling of the interaction of light with nanometer scale metallic structures taking into account non-local dispersion effects

The interaction of light with metallic nanostructures is of increasing interest for various fields of research. When metallic structures have sub-wavelength sizes and the illuminating frequencies are in the regime of metal's plasma frequency, electron interaction with the exciting fields have to be taken into account. Due to these interactions, plasmonic surface waves can be excited and cause extreme local field enhancements (e.g. surface plasmon polariton electromagnetic waves). Exploiting such field enhancements in applications of interest requires a detailed knowledge about the occurring fields which can generally not be obtained analytically. For the latter mentioned reason, numerical tools as well as a deeper understanding of the underlying physics, are absolutely necessary. For the numerical modeling of light/structure interaction on the nanoscale, the choice of an appropriate material model is a crucial point. Approaches that are adopted in a first instance are based on local (i.e. with no interaction between electrons) dispersive models e.g. Drude or Drude-Lorentz models. From the mathematical point of view, when a time-domain modeling is considered, these models lead to an additional system of ordinary differential equation which is coupled to Maxwell's equations. When it comes to very small structures in a regime of 2~nm to 25~nm, non-local effects due to electron collisions have to be taken into account. Non-locality leads to additional, in general non-linear, system of partial differential equations and is significantly more difficult to treat, though. Nevertheless, dealing with a linear non-local dispersion model is already a setting that opens the route to numerous practical applications of plasmonics. In this work, we present a Discontinuous Galerkin Time-Domain (DGTD) method able to solve the system of Maxwell equations coupled to a linearized non-local dispersion model relevant to plasmonics. While the method is presented in the general 3d case, numerical results are given for 2d simulation settings only