Magnetic Localized Surface Plasmons For Magnetic Resonance Imaging Applications

Recently, a great deal of research efforts has been focused on subwavelength photonics devices for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), one of the cornerstone diagnostic techniques in life science. We show that the excitations of magnetic localized surface plasmons (MLSPs), surface waves hosted by a subwavelength negative magnetic permeability sphere, can yield a strong enhancement of the MRI scanner performances. In addition, we demonstrate that MLSPs can be mimicked by substituting the negative permeability metamaterial (MM) sphere with a homogeneous high-permittivity one of the same radius. Our approach overcomes several limits of the standard MM approaches (generally, based on effective medium theories) avoiding complex 3D fabrication procedures and removing the local spatial MM inhomogeneities whose presence is detrimental in subwavelength photonics applications.