Light, entropy and nanoparticles

Nanoparticles show many exciting and novel optical properties
including the ability to scatter light to give sub-wavelength control
of the optical field. This makes many novel applications possible
including surface enhanced spectroscopies, sub-wavelength lithography
and many promising approaches in plasmonics. New techniques are
needed to accurately understand and design the optical behaviour of
particles on the nanoscale. We present a method of calculating both
the internal and scattered fields at any point in space around
arbitrarily shaped axisymmetric nanoparticles. The flexibility of this
technique allows us to find the scattering properties of dielectric
and metallic particles, including both perfect conductors and genuine
metals. This approach gives us access to details of the
electromagnetic fields, both at the surface of particles and the far
field region away from the particle, to an arbitrary precision.