Local-field distribution in resonant composites: Green's-function formalism

Abstract

The effective response depends sensitively on composite microstructure due to large fluctuations in the local electric field. For metallic clusters embedded in a dielectric host, the local field distributions are extremely inhomogeneous in space around the metallic clusters due to quasi-static resonance, leading to a large enhancement in the effective linear and nonlinear responses. In this work, we propose a general method for computing the electric field of metallic clusters near resonance via a perturbation formalism. We illustrate the method by simple examples.