Landau damping of surface plasmons in metal nanostructures

We present a quantum-mechanical model for surface-assisted plasmon decay in metal nanostructures of arbitrary shape. We obtain an explicit expression, in terms of local fields inside the metal structure, for surface absorbed power and surface scattering rate for nanostructures with characteristic size larger than the nonlocality scale, and calculate the Landau damping rate for several common nanoparticle shapes. We show that surface scattering is highly sensitive to the local field polarization and can be incorporated into the metal dielectric function along with phonon and impurity scattering. Our model can be used for calculations of plasmon-assisted hot carrier generation rates in photovoltaics and photochemistry applications.