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Surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) propagating at metal nanostructures play an important role in breaking the diffraction limit. Chemically synthesized single-crystalline metal nanoplates with atomically flat surfaces provide favorable features compared with traditional polycrystalline metal films. The excitation and propagation of leaky SPPs on micrometer sized (10–20 μm) and thin (30 nm) gold nanoplates are investigated utilizing leakage radiation microscopy. By varying polarization and excitation positions of incident light on apexes of nanoplates, wave-vector (including propagation constant and propagation direction) distributions of leaky SPPs in Fourier planes can be controlled, indicating tunable SPP propagation. These results hold promise for potential development of chemically synthesized single-crystalline metal nanoplates as plasmonic platforms in future applications.

A non-complicated, controllable method of metallic nanoparticle fabrication at low operating light power is proposed. The method is based on laser-induced forward transfer, using a metamaterial absorber as the donor to significantly enhance the photothermal effect and reduce the operating light fluence to 35 mJ/cm(2), which is much lower than that in previous works. A large number of metallic nanoparticles can be transferred by one shot of focused nanosecond laser pulses. Transferred nanoparticles exhibit good size uniformity and the sizes are controllable. The optical properties of transferred particles are characterized by dark-field spectroscopy and the experimental results agree with the simulation results.