Extinction measurements of metallic nanoparticles arrays as a way to explore the single nanoparticle plasmon resonances.

The optical characterization of a single metallic nanostructure has a strong interest in the scientific community owing to its localized surface plasmon resonances. For a single nano-object, the simplest and the accepted optical characterization technique is dark-field spectroscopy, even if there are many drawbacks and a certain complexity to operate it. We propose here using extinction spectroscopy of nanoparticles ensembles to characterize optically a single nanostructure. The scattering spectrum of a single gold nanocylinder and the extinction spectrum of a well-chosen array show similar results. We perform an experimental and numerical comparative study to draw parallels between both techniques.