An Electric Field Volume Integral Equation Approach to Simulate Surface Plasmon Polaritons

In this paper we present an electric field volume integral equation approach to simulate surface plasmon propagation along metal/dielectric interfaces. Metallic objects embedded in homogeneous dielectric media are considered. Starting point is a so-called weak-form of the electric field integral equation. This form is discretized on a uniform tensor-product grid resulting in a system matrix whose action on a vector can be computed via the fast Fourier transform. The GMRES iterative solver is used to solve the discretized set of equations and numerical examples, illustrating surface plasmon propagation, are presented. The convergence rate of GMRES is discussed in terms of the spectrum of the system matrix and through numerical experiments we show how the eigenvalues of the discretized volume scattering operator are related to plasmon propagation and the medium parameters of a metallic object.