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Fano Resonance Induced Anomalous Collective Hotspots in Metallic Nanoparticle Dimer Chains

Hotspots with strong near fields due to localized surface plasmons (LSPs) in metallic nanostructures have various applications, such as surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS). The long range Coulomb coupling between LSPs in periodic metallic nanostructures may lead to interesting collective effects. In this paper, we investigate the combination effects of the local field enhancement and collective plasmon resonances in one dimensional metallic nanoparticle dimer chains. It is found that the strong near field in the gap and the far field interactions among the metallic nanoparticles lead to anomalous collective hotspots with dual enhancement of the electromagnetic field. In particular, the interference between the incident field and the induced internal field leads to Fano-type effect with Wood anomaly related destructive interference and the strong resonance with an extremely narrow width. Our systematic study shows that the correlation between the local structure and the global structure has important impact on the collective spots, which leads to an optimal orientation of the dimer (about 60° with respect to the chain direction) for the largest gap field enhancement with the incident field polarization parallel to the long axis of the dimer.