Comprehensive Study of Plasmonic Materials in the Visible and Near-Infrared: Linear, Refractory, and Nonlinear Optical Properties

Abstract

Plasmonic nanostructures are used today for a variety of applications. Choosing the best suited plasmonic material for a specific application depends on several criteria, such as chemical and thermal stability, bulk plasma frequency, nonlinear response, and fabrication constraints. To provide a comprehensive summary, we compare these properties for eight different plasmonic materials, namely, Ag, Al, Au, Cu, Mg, Ni, Pd, and Pt. All these materials can be fabricated with electron beam lithography and subsequent evaporation of the desired material. First, we heated rod-antenna-type nanostructures made from these materials up to 1100 °C in air and investigated their linear optical response. Most structures lose their plasmonic properties at temperatures far below the melting point of the respective material. Gold, silver, and platinum structurally deform, whereas the other materials appear to chemically degrade. Second, to improve the thermal stability, structures with a 4 nm thin Al2O3 capping layer are fabricated. The thermal stability is significantly increased with the capping layer for all materials except for copper and magnesium. Lastly, the laser damage threshold is investigated for silver, aluminum, gold, and copper, which exhibit high nonlinear optical susceptibilities and are therefore particularly interesting for nonlinear optical applications.

Two-dimensional Au & Ag hybrid plasmonic nanoparticle network: broadband nonlinear optical response and applications for pulsed laser generation

“…Recently, there has been an increasing interests in NLO properties of metallic nanoparticles (NPs), which have proved to be highly valuable for a variety of applications including plasmon-enhanced spectroscopies, biosensing, optical tweezers, optical bistability, ultrafast optical switch and modulation, optoelectronic devices, and so on [1][2][3][4][5][6][7]. The NLO responses of metallic NPs are in a large extent determined by the plasmonic resonances (surface plasmon resonance (SPR) for extended metallic surfaces, and localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) for metallic NPs), which are the conduction electron coherent oscillations stimulated by the incident light and strongly dependent on NPs' geometry and surroundings [1,[8][9][10][11][12][13]. Therefore, it provides a great platform for modulating the optical responses by tuning the metallic NPs' shapes, sizes, and environments, etc.…”

Ultrafast cryptography with indefinitely switchable optical nanoantennas

“…Another potential source of errors is nanoantenna damage owing to overheating, which might change its optical properties. However, a recent study 31 has shown that coating of plasmonic nanoantennas with a protective Al 2 O 3 thin layer gives rise to unchanged both linear and nonlinear responses during 10-min illumination at a pulse repetition rate of 44 MHz and a pulse intensity 0.6 GW cm −2 . This observation allows us to believe that this issue is also avoidable.…”

Morphology dependent nonlinear optical and photocatalytic activity of anisotropic plasmonic silver

“…28 Alteration of the structural symmetry of nanoparticles can inuence their linear optical, non-linear optical, electronic, catalytic and even biological properties. [29][30][31][32][33][34] Anisotropic metallic nano particles possess asymmetry axes, and this break in symmetry leads to remarkable optical and chemical properties. Although there have been a large number reports on various anisotropic systems, hydrogen peroxide together with trisodium citrate mediated green synthesis, nonlinear optical and photo catalytic analysis of anisotropic silver nano prisms have seldom been studied.…”