Emergent mobility edges and intermediate phases in one-dimensional quasiperiodic plasmonic chains

Abstract

Anderson localization has been widely studied in low-dimensional aperiodic electronic, photonic, and acoustic systems. However, the disorder effect in the plasmonic system, where retardation and long-range couplings interact in complex ways, remains an open question. In this work, we investigate the localization properties of one-dimensional quasiperiodic plasmonic chains using the coupled dipole method and linearized Green's function. Our models, which incorporate nearest-neighbor or long-range dipole interactions, reveal localization transitions, mobility edges, and intermediate phases. It is found that long-range dipole interactions and non-Hermiticity due to retardation both play crucial roles in Anderson localization, yielding the emergence of intermediate phases with varying widths. A link between non-Hermiticity and Anderson transition is established by the mean phase rigidity, revealing strong non-Hermiticity along the phase boundary. The plasmonic model involving long-range interplay and retarded effect presents richer localization phenomena than the electronic counterpart that usually includes only nearest-neighbor coupling, laying a foundation for experimental observations of Anderson localization on plasmonic platforms.