Surface mode hybridization in the optical response of core-shell particles

Abstract: We present an exact rewriting of the Mie coefficients describing the scattering of light by a spherical core-shell particle which enables their interpretation in terms of an hybridization of the two surface modes arising, respectively, at the core-shell and the shell-medium interface. For this particular case we thus obtain from the Mie theory--analytically for all multipole orders and hence for arbitrarily sized particles--the hybridization scenario, which so far has been employed primarily for small particles in the electrostatic approximation. To demonstrate the strength of the rewriting approach we also extract the hybridization scenario for a stratified sphere directly from the expansion coefficients for the electromagnetic fields.