Interaction of Solid State Plasmon with Radiation I. Absorption of Eletromagnetic Radiation

Abstract

The interaction of metallic electrons with electromagnetic fields are formulated in the formalism of Bohm and Pines' theory. The formulation has the merit of direct applicability for the case of thin metal foil, which will be treated subsequently. In this paper the result is applied to the absorption of radiation by an electron gas with an emission of a plasmon which was also treated recently by Tzoar and Klein by the Green function method. Since the latter work contains some errors we recalculated the absorption cross section numerically and found that the cross section is of the order of 10 -19 cm 2 . The contributions of the individual electron excitation to the absorption are also considered in order to see the possibility of the experimental detection of the process considered.