Comparison of electromagnetic field solvers for the 3D analysis of plasmonic nanoantennas

Plasmonic nano antennas are highly attractive at optical frequencies due to their strong resonances - even when their size is smaller than the wavelength - and because of their potential of extreme field enhancement. Such antennas may be applied for sensing of biological nano particles as well as for single molecule detection. Because of considerable material losses and strong dispersion of metals at optical frequencies, the numerical analysis of plasmonic antennas is very demanding. An additional difficulty is caused when very narrow gaps between nano particles are utilized for increasing the field enhancement. In this paper we discuss the main difficulties of time domain solvers, namely FDTD and FVTD and we compare various frequency domain solvers, namely the commercial FEM packages JCMsuite, Comsol, HFSS, and Microwave Studio with the semi-analytic MMP code that may be used as a reference due to its fast convergence and high accuracy. The current version of this paper has had a correction made to it at the request of the author. Please see the linked Errata for further details.

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