Another paper came out 1 of the collaboration between our neighbours in the Surface Nanoengineering group and the Maćkowski group in Toruń. This a paper is in a long series on plasmonic silver nanostructures that they have published. This time the nanostructures are created by printing. More specifically, a droplet containing silver nitrate and sodium citrate is illuminated with a laser to activate photochemical reduction of the silver ions to silver metal nanoparticles. By scanning the samples in front of the laser any shape of patterns can be formed.
Here, the plasmonic activity of the silver island films (SIF) created in this way is tested using two different systems, a photoactive protein and and up-converting rare-earths doped nanocrystals. Experimentally measured enhancements of the activity of these systems are of the order of 5–7, and both an increase of absorption as well as radiative emission rates contribute to this effect. This is a demonstration that high quality plasmonically-active patterns of arbitrary shape can be used for enhancing the optical response of organic and inorganic materials and it can open a way to implement these structures for optoelectronic and sensing devices.
This is mostly work done by the Maćkowski group and Martin had a part in the work mostly doing SEM of the various SIFs.
- M. Szalkowski, K. Sulowska, M. Jönsson-Niedziółka, K. Wiwatowski, J. Niedziółka-Jönsson, S. Maćkowski, D. Piątkowski
Photochemical Printing of Plasmonically Active Silver Nanostructures, Int. J. Mol. Sci. 21, 2006 (2020). (link – OA)
