Optical Inversion Using Plasmonic Contrast Agents

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 nanoparticles. Such a technique is known in the framework of imaging using contrast agents where, in optical imaging, the nanoparticles play the role of these contrast agents. The plasmonic nanoparticles 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 nanoparticles. 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 nanoparticles, 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 behaviour 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 nanoparticles as contrast agents.