Tunable plasmonic resonance arising from broken-symmetric silver nanobeads with dielectric cores

We investigate the plasmonic resonance modes and coupling effects of single silver nanobeads and silver nanobead dimers. Numerical investigation using the three-dimensional finite element method indicates that silver nanobeads exhibit two plasmonic resonances corresponding to the bonding and anti-bonding modes, respectively. The boundary symmetry on the inner and outer surfaces of the silver nanobeads can be broken by increasing the refractive indices of the cores filling the dielectric holes. It is shown that only the bonding mode can be found for low-refractive index cores, whereas both bonding and anti-bonding modes can be found for high-refractive index cores. © 2012 IOP Publishing Ltd.