Abstract

The scouting of alternative plasmonic materials able to enhance and extend the optical properties of noble metal nanostructures is on the rise. Aluminum is endowed with a set of interesting properties which turn it into an attractive plasmonic material. Here we present the optical and electronic features of different aluminum nanostructures stemming from a multilevel computational study. Molecular Dynamics (MD) simulations using a reactive force field (ReaxFF){,} carefully validated with Density Functional Theory (DFT){,} were employed to mimic the oxidation of icosahedral aluminum nanoclusters. Resulting structures with different oxidation degrees were then studied through the Time-Dependent Density Functional Tight Binding (TD-DFTB) method. A similar approach was used in aluminum nanoclusters with a disordered structure to study how the loss of crystallinity affects the optical properties. To the best of our knowledge{,} this is the first report that addresses this issue from the fully atomistic time-dependent approach by means of two different and powerful simulation tools able to describe quantum and physicochemical properties associated with nanostructured particles."}