Fluorophore-Doped Core–Multishell Spherical Plasmonic Nanocavities: Resonant Energy Transfer toward a Loss Compensation

Abstract

Plasmonics exhibits the potential to break the diffraction limit and bridge the gap between electronics and photonics by routing and manipulating light at the nanoscale. However, the inherent and strong energy dissipation present in metals, especially in the near-infrared and visible wavelength ranges, significantly hampers the applications in nanophotonics. Therefore, it is a major challenge to mitigate the losses. One way to compensate the losses is to incorporate gain media into plasmonics. Here, we experimentally show that the incorporation of gain material into a local surface plasmonic system (Au/silica/silica dye core-multishell nanoparticles) leads to a resonant energy transfer from the gain media to the plasmon. The optimized conditions for the largest loss compensation are reported. Both the coupling distance and the spectral overlap are the key factors to determine the resulting energy transfer. The interplay of these factors leads to a non-monotonous photoluminescence dependence as a function of the silica spacer shell thickness. Nonradiative transfer rate is increased by more than 3 orders of magnitude at the resonant condition, which is key evidence of the strongest coupling occurring between the plasmon and the gain material.

Advances in small lasers

“…An experimental demonstration of a single isolated device has yet to be shown. Other studies of similar configurations have found evidence of strong coupling of the gain material to the plasmon mode (evidenced by considerable reductions in excited state lifetime) but have not observed spaser action 78 . The metal losses in these localized surface plasmon cavities are very high, with Q factors of just a few tens, hence the material gain required to overcome losses is predicted to be on the order of 10 5 cm -1 79 .…”

Influence of gold-silica nanoparticles on the performance of small-molecule bulk heterojunction solar cells

“…The procedure of Au-silica nanorods consists of two parts: (i) seed-mediated synthesis of gold nanorods using a seed solution and the reagent hexadecyltrimethylammonium bromide and (ii) solution synthesis of the silica shell using tetraethyl orthosilicate [23]. In order to have a more rigorous comparison with core-shell gold nanorods, bare gold nanorods were also synthesized by the seed-mediated method only.…”

Tailoring the Lasing Modes in Semiconductor Nanowire Cavities Using Intrinsic Self-Absorption

“…2,13,14 For practical applications, the ability to tailor the NW cavity mode is essential for developing multi-color miniaturized lasers, and critical for optimizing the resonant energy transfer between the cavity and the coupled system. 15 For a II-VI or III-V NW Fabry-Pé rot cavity, it is generally accepted that the output laser wavelength is determined by the bandgap of semiconductor NW. 11 To date, there is only limited success in tuning the optical cavity modes through (a) electric field modulation; and (b) elemental doping of the semiconductors.…”