Anisotropic plasmon-coupling dimerization of a pair of spherical electron gases.

We have discovered a novel feature in the plasmon excitations for a pair of Coulomb-coupled non-concentric spherical two-dimensional electron gases (S2DEGs). Our results show that the plasmon excitations for such pairs depend on the orientation with respect to the external electromagnetic probe field. The origin of this anisotropy of the inter-sphere Coulomb interaction is due to the directional asymmetry of the electrostatic coupling of electrons in excited states which depend on both the angular momentum quantum number L and its projection M on the axis of quantization taken as the probe E-field direction. We demonstrate the anisotropic inter-sphere Coulomb coupling in space and present semi-analytic results in the random-phase approximation both perpendicular and parallel to the axis of quantization. For the incidence of light with a finite orbital or spin angular momentum, the magnetic field generated from an induced oscillating electric dipole on one sphere can couple to an induced magnetic dipole on another sphere in a way that is dependent on whether the direction is parallel or perpendicular to the probe E field. Such an effect from the plasmon spatial correlation is expected to be experimentally observable by employing circularly polarized light or a helical light beam for incidence. The S2DEG serves as a simple model for fullerenes as well as metallic dimers, when the energy bands are far apart.