What we expect from weakly dissipating materials at the range of plasmon resonance frequencies

Development of modern materials, including nanoclusters, cluster assembled materials and metamaterials is among the actual challenges for the development of future nanotechnologies. Here we discuss the peculiarities of far-field and near-field light scattering by plasmonic nanoparticles, and possible applications of weakly dissipating materials. Over the last few years many peculiarities of light scattering have been found for nanoparticles in the regime of plasmon resonances. Optical excitation of localized plasmons is accompanied by inverse process - transformation of localized resonant plasmons into scattered light. When radiative damping prevails over the dissipative damping, the effects of anomalous light scattering result in sharp giant optical resonances and complicated near-field structure of the Poynting vector field, see e.g. [1-4]. Here we present peculiarities of far-field and near-field light scattering by plasmonic nanoparticles with weak dissipation and anisotropy.