The year started with the publication of an article in J. Phys. Chem. C1 on propagating plasmons in silver nanowires. This work in yet another in the series of articles on silver nanostructures and plasmons run by our neighbours in the Surface Nanoengineering group and the Maćkowski group in Toruń. In this work, it was shown that plasmons travelling through one nanowire can be transmitted to another nanowire through a droplet of quantum dots. If two nanowires are places end to end, a travelling plasmon can “jump” the gap from one wire to the other and a (very) faint glow can be seen at the end of the second wire. However, if the gap is bigger, this transfer is no longer possible, unless a droplet of QDs is placed in between the nanowires. Then, the QDs can get excited by the light emerging from the first wire and the excited light from the QDs can be coupled into the second wire. The hope is that such an approach can be extended to make coupling between any type of nanostructures possible and can be used in the future in the fabrication of nanophotonic devices.
To be able to investigate this, a method was developed to deposit very small droplets with quantum nanodots and to move the nanowires to align up with the droplets. More on deposition of the QDs, and actually moving the drops around as well, was published by Biały et al. in the end of last year. Interestingly, one of the reviewers didn’t believe that moving the silver nanowires was possible, so a short film was included in the SI.
As usual in these papers, Martin was involved mainly doing SEM imaging and helping to analyse some of the data, and making the graphical abstract. 2
- M. Biały, K. Sulowska, K. Wiwatowski, M. Ćwik, D. Buczyńska, W. Nogala, M. Jonsson-Niedziółka, D. Piątkowski, S. Maćkowski, J. Niedziółka-Jonsson
Optical Interfacing of Plasmonic Waveguides with Colloidal Quantum Dots, J. Phys. Chem. C (accepted). (link – OA) - He also prepared the GA for the paper mentioned above, and for a third recent paper on plasmons in silver nanowires published by the Surface Nanoengineering Group
