Abstract

We present the recent study on the electromagnetic scattering generated by a cluster of nanoparticles with highly contrasting parameters, embedded into a background made of a vacuum. In the resulting point-interaction approximations for the far fields, the nanoparticles can be distributed to occupy volume-like domains or low dimensional hypersurfaces where periodicity is not required. Then concerning the extreme case for the size of the nanoparticles being small enough, we investigate the corresponding effective medium. As an intriguing application to inverse problems, we describe a new method to reconstruct the permittivity distribution, of an object to image, from the remotely measured electromagnetic field using plasmonic nanoparticles as contrast agents.