This contribution reports the chiro-optic response of as-cast and photopatterned films of silver nanoparticles capped with photothermally-cleavable chiral ligands. We demonstrate broadband circular dichroism in these nanoparticle films, which is not present in dispersions of the nanoparticles capped with the chiral ligands. Long wavelength circular dichroism is derived from coupling of the plas...

Shifts of the resonance frequency of high Q whispering gallery modes (WGMs) in spherical dielectric microresonators by plasmonic nanoparticles can be greater than the WGM line width, such that the perturbation theory commonly used for describing resonance shifts by dielectric nanoparticles (Teraoka and Arnold 2006 J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 23 1381) is no longer applicable. This paper therefore reports...

Plasmonic nanoparticle-based photothermal cancer therapy is a promising new tool to inflict localized and irreversible damage to tumor tissue by hyperthermia, without harming surrounding healthy tissue. We developed a single particle and positron emission tomography (PET)-based platform to quantitatively correlate the heat generation of plasmonic nanoparticles with their potential as cancer kil...

By coating plasmonic nanoparticles (NPs) with thermally responsive liquid crystals (LCs) it is possible to prepare reversibly reconfigurable plasmonic nanomaterials with prospective applications in optoelectronic devices. However, simple and versatile methods to precisely tailor properties of liquid-crystalline nanoparticles (LC NPs) are still required. Here, we report a new method for tuning s...

A novel laser rapid thermal annealing (LRTA) technique is reported to tune the plasmonic resonance of disk-shaped nanoporous gold (NPG) nanoparticles for the first time. LRTA alters both the external and internal geometrical parameters of NPG nanoparticles at temperatures significantly lower than the melting temperature of bulk gold or non-porous gold nanoparticles. With increasing annealing la...

The plasmonic behavior of metals at the nanoscale is not only appealing for fundamental studies, but also very useful for the development of innovative photonic devices. The past few decades have witnessed great progress in colloidal synthesis of monodisperse metal nanoparticles with defined shapes. This has significantly fueled up the research of directing the metal nanoparticles to self-assem...

A key challenge for the development of plasmonic nanodevices is their integration into active semiconducting structures. Gold-catalysed semiconductor nanowires are promising candidates for their bottom-up growth process that aligns a single gold nanoparticle at each nanowire apex. Unfortunately these show extremely poor plasmonic properties. In this work, we propose a way to enhance their plasm...

Alkanethiol-capped gold nanoparticles dispersed in n-dodecane were studied by spectroscopic ellipsometry and were modeled using Mie scattering theory. The refractive index in the visible and near-infrared depended on the volume fraction of gold nanoparticles, in good agreement with the theoretical expectation that such dispersed plasmonic nanoparticles can act as low or tunable refractive index...

Photonic crystal coupled with plasmonic nanoparticle arrays to form a periodic plasmonic architecture was prepared by loading Au nanoparticles inside the inverse opal TiO(2) film. The visible and near infrared light absorption was increased by 62% and the overall light-to-electricity conversion yield was thus increased by 41% compared with the control test.

We developed a versatile numerical technique to compute the three-dimensional charge distribution inside plasmonic nanoparticles. This method can be easily applied to investigate the charge distribution inside arbitrarily complex plasmonic nanostructures and to identify the nature of the multipolar plasmon modes involved at plasmonic resonances. Its ability to unravel the physical origin of pla...