In our latest paper, we show a proof-of-concept method to computationally study the optical response of an electron gas in a slab confinement. The use of the Path-integral Monte Carlo method allows us to account for many-body exchange-correlation and finite temperature effects on the observables . We focus on the comparison between our data and the well-known Drude and Drude-Lorentz models of electric permittivity, particularly in the breakdown of the symmetry of these models as we increase the confinement and vary the parameters. Because the confinements are on the nanoscopic scale, we think that this work can provide insight into the complicated electronic phenomena at play on the surfaces of thin films.
You can find our preprint on arXiv