Critical excitation-rate enhancement of a dipolar scatterer close to a plasmonic nanosphere and importance of multipolar self-coupling

We develop an electrodynamic model based on dyadic Green's functions for analyzing the near-field interactions between a dipolar scatterer (DS) and a plasmonic nanosphere (PN) under external excitation, accounting for multipolar contributions in the evaluation of the scattered fields. In particular, we include all the radiative and nonradiative field interactions between the DS and the PN, particularly the physical mechanism of DS's self-coupling through the PN, which is either neglected or approximated in previous work. Our objective is to show under which conditions self-coupling is important for strong excitation-rate enhancement of the DS and provide a description of the system's properties. We analytically investigate the conditions under which the excitation rate of a DS, such as an organic dye or a quantum dot, is enhanced when located in close proximity to a PN. We show the existence of critical conditions in terms of polarizabilities and distances that lead to large enhancement based on self-coupling and how to predict it.