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Year of the Plasmon

By James Van Howe


Sketch of Edward Synge's proposed near-field microscope. The red dot denotes the gold nanoparticle.
Sketch of Edward Synge's proposed near-field microscope. The red dot denotes the gold nanoparticle. Picture from L. Novotny, Phys. Today, 64, 47 (2011).

This post originally appeared on Jim’s CLEO Blog and is reproduced with permission from the author.

This year may not be a flush for the market but it is looking good for plasmonics. Expansion of the the work shown in CLEO 2011, Postdeadline paper “Nanoantenna-enhanced gas sensing in a single tailored nanofocus,” from Na Liu et al. just took the August cover of Nature Materials. Additionally, plasmonics has had a solid recent run of the main-stream physics circuit after the publication of two Physics Today articles earlier this year in February and July.

The July issue of Physics Today features an article by Lukas Novotny from University of Rochester in which he reviews near-field optics, the broader category where plasmonics resides. Earlier in the year, Mark Stockman of Georgia State University wrote a very accessible and informative article on nanoplasmonics that took the cover of the February issue of Physics Today. The cover shows a 13th century stained glass window of Sainte Chappelle in Paris whose yellow and red brilliance are assumed to come from nanoplasmonic resonances of silver and gold nanoparticles in the glass. The optical effect of how the red changes over the length of the window is said to have purposely been designed to mimic the flowing blood of Christ.

Novotny’s July article also offers a romantic insight into the history of near-field optics and plasmonics. Novotny, recounts how in 1928, Edward Synge wrote a “prophetic letter” to Einstein proposing a near-field microscope (see Figure above) to optically image a biological sample below the diffraction limit. Synge’s proposed microscope, which could not be realized until 1982 (by Dieter Phol’s group at IBM of Switzerland), looks eerily familiar to current techniques used for the development of plasmonic devices and sensing- the use of metallic nanoparticles to generate surface plasmons in order to enhance a probing optical field. The two Physics Today articles are must-reads for those who need a crash-course on plasmonics.

A plasmon is created when the electrons on a metal surface are periodically displaced with respect to the lattice ions by an external, driving, optical field, creating an “electron oscillator”… for the full post click here.

Posted: 17 August 2011 by James Van Howe | with 0 comments

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