Plasmon excitations in cylindrical wires by external charged particles

We study the interaction of external charged particles with the bulk and surface modes of cylindrical wires using classical and quantum mechanical formulations. First, the dielectric function approach is used to calculate the main induced effects and to derive the average number of excited plasmons in a semiclassical way. Second, the surface and bulk plasmon fields are quantized and the corresponding processes of plasmon excitations are described in detail. The correspondence between the classical and quantum pictures is shown. General scaling properties of the interaction terms are presented, and various illustrative examples are given.