3 research outputs found

    Monitoring morphological changes in 2D monolayer semiconductors using atom-thick plasmonic nanocavities

    Get PDF
    This is an open access article published under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) License.-- et al.Nanometer-sized gaps between plasmonically coupled adjacent metal nanoparticles enclose extremely localized optical fields, which are strongly enhanced. This enables the dynamic investigation of nanoscopic amounts of material in the gap using optical interrogation. Here we use impinging light to directly tune the optical resonances inside the plasmonic nanocavity formed between single gold nanoparticles and a gold surface, filled with only yoctograms of semiconductor. The gold faces are separated by either monolayers of molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) or two-unit-cell thick cadmium selenide (CdSe) nanoplatelets. This extreme confinement produces modes with 100-fold compressed wavelength, which are exquisitely sensitive to morphology. Infrared scattering spectroscopy reveals how such nanoparticle-on-mirror modes directly trace atomic-scale changes in real time. Instabilities observed in the facets are crucial for applications such as heat-assisted magnetic recording that demand long-lifetime nanoscale plasmonic structures, but the spectral sensitivity also allows directly tracking photochemical reactions in these 2-dimensional solids.This work was supported by the UK EPSRC grants EP/G060649/1, EP/L027151/1, Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL), and ERC grant 320503 LINASS. C.T. and J.A. acknowledge financial support from Project FIS2013-41184-P from MINECO, ETORTEK 2014-15 of the Basque Department of Industry and IT756-13 from the Basque consolidated groups.Peer Reviewe

    Monitoring morphological changes in 2D monolayer semiconductors using atom-thick plasmonic nanocavities.

    Get PDF
    Nanometer-sized gaps between plasmonically coupled adjacent metal nanoparticles enclose extremely localized optical fields, which are strongly enhanced. This enables the dynamic investigation of nanoscopic amounts of material in the gap using optical interrogation. Here we use impinging light to directly tune the optical resonances inside the plasmonic nanocavity formed between single gold nanoparticles and a gold surface, filled with only yoctograms of semiconductor. The gold faces are separated by either monolayers of molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) or two-unit-cell thick cadmium selenide (CdSe) nanoplatelets. This extreme confinement produces modes with 100-fold compressed wavelength, which are exquisitely sensitive to morphology. Infrared scattering spectroscopy reveals how such nanoparticle-on-mirror modes directly trace atomic-scale changes in real time. Instabilities observed in the facets are crucial for applications such as heat-assisted magnetic recording that demand long-lifetime nanoscale plasmonic structures, but the spectral sensitivity also allows directly tracking photochemical reactions in these 2-dimensional solids.This work was supported by the UK EPSRC grant EP/G060649/1, Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL), and ERC grant 320503 LINASS.This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from ACS via http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/nn5064198
    corecore