We report on the experimental observation of multipolar plasmon excitations
in lithographically designed elongated silver particles. In contrast to sp
heres, where the extinction bands of the respective multipolar plasmons ove
rlap considerably to form a broad spectrum, spectrally well-separated extin
ction bands corresponding to plasmons of multipolar order up to n=6 are fou
nd. The results agree well with numerical simulations based on the Green's
Dyadic method. (C) 2000 American Institute of Physics. [S0003-6951(00)03847
-X].