Scientists at Houston's Rice University have developed a model of the plasmon response of metallic nanostructures to light that may facilitate the development of such nanomaterials and devices. Plasmons are light-generated electronic density waves. Similar to molecular orbital theory, the approach describes these plasmons in a complex system as the interaction of the plasmons in several simpler systems.

To validate their predictions, the researchers compared the extinction spectra that they calculated for a concentric nanoshell with those obtained experimentally from 1.4-µm-diameter silica nanoparticles layered with gold and silica. They found good agreement between the theoretical and experimental results, suggesting that the model may be used to design future plasmonic devices from the bottom up.