CPM Seminar

Building Novel Optical Materials with Plasmonic Nanocrystals

Andrea Tao

Department of NanEngineering
University of California, San Diego

A critical need in nanotechnology is the development of new tools and methods to organize, connect, and integrate solid-state nanocomponents. I will present our recent work on the synthesis and self-assembly of nanocrystals for plasmonics, where light is propagated, manipulated, and confined by solid-state components that are smaller than the wavelength of light itself. We show the organization of polymer-grafted metal nanocrystals into nanojunction arrays that possess intense “hot spots” due to electromagnetic field localization. We also show that doped semiconductor nanocrystals can serve as a new class of plasmonic building blocks, where shape and carrier density can be actively tuned to engineer plasmon resonances. The hierarchical structures generated by self-assembly of these nanomaterials possess unique electromagnetic properties that we are utilizing in applications such as near-field spectroscopy, biosensing, and optoelectronics.