Experiments on tiny gold prisms help to explain the unusual electrodynamics of nanostructures

Nanoplasmonics—the study of light manipulation on the nanometer scale—has contributed to the production of novel devices for chemical and biological sensing, signal processing and solar energy. However, components at such small scales experience strange effects that classical electrodynamics cannot explain. A particular challenge for theorists lies in isolating so-called 'nonlocal' effects, whereby the optical properties of a particle are not constant but depend on nearby electromagnetic fields.

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