Surface plasmon, the collective oscillation of electron clouds at metal/dielectric interfaces, focuses the electromagnetic energy in subwavelength region because the characteristic wavelength is much smaller, and the speed of surface plasmon is much s...
Surface plasmon, the collective oscillation of electron clouds at metal/dielectric interfaces, focuses the electromagnetic energy in subwavelength region because the characteristic wavelength is much smaller, and the speed of surface plasmon is much slower than the ones at vacuum. This focusing effect dramatically increases when two metal/dielectric interfaces are adjacent. Plasmonic nanoparticles are of special interest, because their surface plasmon resonance lies in visible to near-IR region depending on their size, and the light they focus can drastically increase the response of the nearby molecules. Core-gap-shell type plasmonic nanoparticles are a promising platform because they can serve precisely controlled and robust nanogap of one to a few nm.
In this thesis, the behavior of the intra-nanogap plasmons were discussed. First, fundamentals of plasmonics and properties of plasmonic nanogaps were introduced. Next, Synthetic strategies of web-above-a-ring (WAR) and web-above-a-lens (WAL) nanostructures are reported. The WAR has a controllable gap between the nanoring core and a nanoweb with nanopores for the effective confinement of electromagnetic field in the nanogap and subsequent surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) of Raman dyes inside the gap with high signal reproducibility. In chapter 3, the intragap structure formed by selective etching of silver in gold core-
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gold,silver alloy shell particle. By controlling the composition of silver in the alloy shell, the gap thickness was uniform and tunable. Nanobridges formed during the raction is attributed to the discrepancy in the trends in plasmon resonance and corresponding SERS response between the synthesized and modeled structures. For proper modeling of the nanobridges, the formation mechanism was proposed via atomistic kinetic Monte Carlo simulation. In the last chapter, we define the intragap plasmon resonance, and studied how the intragap plasmon resonance change as the structure gradually, continuously transforms from cubic core-gap-cubic to spherical core-gap-sphere. The intragap plasmon resonance destructively interfered with the plasmon excited at the outer surface of the shell if they have different symmetry. If not, they did not interfere with each other. The spectral position intragap plasmon resonance did not change when two core-gap-shell particles are adjacent and the plasmonic coupling occurs. This feature is expected to be used as another degree of freedom in designing plasmonic metasurfaces.