Several works shows that it is possible electromagnetic energy transfer below the diffraction limit by means of coupled plasmon modes in chains of closely spaced metal nanoparticles Although these structures exhibit transmission losses due to heating, they have optical functionalities that can not be obtained in other ways at a length scale << 1 mm. Possible applications of this phenomena range from information transmission through geometries of a scale comparable to actual nanometric computers circuits, to their application in nanodevices that increase the sensitivity of chemical and biological sensors.
In this work, we study the necessary conditions for an efficient transmission of an external excitation that affect one nanoparticle to a chain of closely spaced small nanoparticles We solve a model capable of describing such a system and find the limiting conditions for an effective transmission according to all possible parameters of the system . The results are not only applicable to nanoparticles but also to any system that can be described as coupled dipoles in a near field approximation.
