Ultrafast dephasing of surface plasmon excitation in silver nanoparticles:: Influence of particle size, shape, and chemical surrounding -: art. no. 257404

By combination of two special methods, i.e., persistent spectral hole burning and laser assisted nanoparticle preparation, the dephasing time T-2 of surface plasmon excitation in silver nanoparticles was systematically investigated. A strong dependence of T-2 on the plasmon energy is found which reflects the relevance of interband damping and makes necessary a precise control of the particle shape when measuring T-2. The influence of the reduced dimension on the dephasing dynamics was observed as a decrease of T-2 with shrinking particle size. In addition, for silver nanoparticles on quartz substrates, a considerable amount of chemical interface damping was observed.