Achievement

Theoretical work was taken up on ultrafast nanoplasmonics and coherent control at the nanoscale, these topics being of increasing interest to our IGERT. Significant progress was made on the development and application of the theory, together with associated numerical tools, for the study of nanoplasmonics. As an example a finite-difference time-domain approach was used to simulate electromagnetic wave scattering from scatterers embedded in a layered dielectric or dispersive media, addressing specifically the most relevant, but numerically challenging, case of oblique incidence. At the heart of the approach is a derivation of an equivalent one-dimensional wave-propagation equation for dispersive media characterized by a linear sum of Debye-, Drude-, and Lorentz-type poles.