Optical Inversion Using Plasmonic Contrast Agents

Abstract

We describe a new method to reconstruct the permittivity distribution, of an object to image, from the remotely measured electromagnetic field. We propose to use the remote fields measured before and after injecting locally in the medium plasmonic nano-particles. Such a technique is known in the framework of imaging using contrast agents where, in optical imaging, the nano-particles play the role of these contrast agents. The plasmonic nano-particles are known to enjoy resonant effects, as enhancing the applied incident field, while excited at certain particular frequencies called plasmonic resonances. These resonant frequencies encode the values of the unknown permittivity at the location of the injected nano-particles. The imaging methods we propose mainly use this resonant effect. We show that the imaging functional build up from contrasting the fields before and after injecting the nano-particles, measured at one single back-scattered direction, and in an explicit band of incident frequencies reaches its maximum values, in terms of the incident frequency, precisely at the mentioned plasmonic resonances. Such a behavior allows us to recover these plasmonic resonances from which we recover the point-wise values of the permittivity distribution. In this work, we describe the method and provide the mathematical justification of this resonant effect and its use for the optical inversion using plasmonic nano-particles as contrast agents.