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Resonant plasmonic nanostructures have attracted much attention due to their exotic optical properties. In this work, we numerically investigate single- and dual-gap ring structures, respectively, and they can be used for refractive index sensing by exciting the gap plasmon mode with sharp resonance spectra. The dual-gap ring plasmonic sensor shows the dual-channel properties and the corresponding sensitivities are 513 nm/RIU and 809 nm/RIU with the refractive indices range of 1.32–1.37, respectively. Furthermore, the gap ring structures are highly symmetrical, and have advantages in fabrication and pave the way for advanced optical devices to detect bio-molecules.

Excitation of ultraviolet (UV) range plasmon resonance with high quality (Q)-factor has been significantly challenging in plasmonics because of inherent limitations in metals like Au and Ag. Herein, we theoretically investigated UV-visible range plasmons in the topological insulator Bi1.5Sb0.5Te1.8Se1.2 (BSTS) nanosphere and nanoshell. In contrast to broad linewidth plasmon absorptions in the BSTS nanospheres, an ultra-sharp absorption peak with the Q-factor as high as 52 is excited at UV frequencies in the BSTS nanoshells. This peak is attributed to Dirac-type plasmon resonance originating from massless Dirac carriers in surface states of the BSTS. Furthermore, a tunable plasmon wavelength of the resonance is demonstrated by varying geometrical parameters of the BSTS nanoshells. This may find applications in surface enhanced Raman spectroscopies, nanolasers and biosensors in the UV regions.

Plasmonic nanostructures have important applications for surface-enhanced Raman chips, optical sensors, perfect absorbers, and so on. In this paper, we theoretically investigate the optical properties of a T-shaped dimer (TD) nanostructure and a TD with nanowire loads (TD/NL) nanostructure. By depositing the NLs around the TD, the optical property of the TD is significantly modified, and the extinction spectrum of composite TD/NL appears the splitting resonance peak and shows the asymmetric characteristic of Fano resonance due to the plasmon hybridization. Besides, a stronger electric field enhancement can be obtained in the composite TD/NL nanostructure, and the calculated results show the field enhancement effect of the dark mode in designed TD/NL nanostructure is three times than that in the TD nanostructure. Furthermore, the Fano resonance in TD/NL nanostructure reveals the narrow spectral linewidth and high quality factor, which is advantageous to optical refractive index sensors, and the corresponding sensing sensitivity is as high as 1083 nm RIU−1.

We numerically investigated the optical properties of planar resonators metamaterial that exhibits two narrow transmitted dips with quality factors of 23 and 50 in the optical regions. The results show that, both of the two resonances reveal a distinct plasmon shift with respect to a small fluctuation in the refractive index of the surrounding medium, and calculated average refractive index sensitivities are 900 nm/RIU and 493 nm/RIU, and corresponding figure of merits of two modes are 16 and 32 in vacuum, respectively. The sensing performance can be improved by changing the geometric parameters of planar metamaterial due to the plasmon modes coupling effect, which offer an excellent potential for optical nanosensing applications.

We theoretically demonstrate a kind of plasmon coupled cavity to achieve a nanolaser with high intensity and low threshold. The plasmon cavity is composed of the gold film substrate and gold disk array, and support two strong coupled resonance modes (i.e. surface plasmon polariton (SPP) and localized surface plasmon (LSP)). Compared with the nanolaser with the LSP resonance structure, the scattering cross-section of the LSP-SPP coupled laser is 80 times higher. The coupled cavity nanolaser with different wavelengths can be excited with different plasmon resonance modes by selecting the appropriate gain medium. In addition, a compact tunable dual-wavelength laser can be developed using this coupled structure.

Polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP)-protected silver nanostructures of various shapes, including nanocubes, nanospheres, and hybrid shapes with nanospheres and nanorods, on the surface of glass or Si substrates (PVP-Ag films) are prepared by using electrostatic self-assembly. With 4-mercaptobenzoic acid (4-MBA) as a probe molecule, it is demonstrated that the PVP-protected silver nanocubes films (PVP-Ag NCs) have better surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) activity with an order of magnitude larger enhancement factors (EF) than the PVP-protected silver nanospheres films and the PVP-protected silver hybrid shapes films, which is confirmed by our numerical simulations. The EF of 4-MBA on the PVP-Ag NCs film are up to ~5.38 × 106, and the detection limit is at least down to ~10−8 M. The uniformity and reproducibility of the SERS signals on PVP-Ag NCs film are tested by point-to-point and batch-to-batch measurements. Meanwhile, the PVP-Ag films are also shown to be an excellent SERS substrate with good biocompatibility for hemoglobin detection. It is shown that the PVP-Ag NCs films can be used as excellent SERS substrate with good activity, uniformity, reproducibility, and biocompatibility and are promising for a myriad of chemical and biochemical sensing applications.

We propose a kind of gradient metasurface based on graphene apertures for wavefront control of terahertz linear polarized waves. By carefully designing the geometric dimensions of the graphene rectangular apertures, the proposed metasurface can realize arbitrary reflection, carpet cloak and reflective focusing, respectively. The simulation results demonstrate that the cloaking and focusing effects can be actively tuned between ON and OFF state by uniformly tuning the graphene Fermi energy. The metalens based on graphene has high-efficiency, broadband and wide-angle off-axis focusing performance, and the focusing efficiency is significantly dependent on graphene Fermi energy and carrier mobility. When the mobility decreases from 1.0 m2/Vs to 0.1 m2/Vs, the focusing efficiency decreases from more than 70% to about 22% at the operating frequency. The tunable and efficient performance makes the graphene aperture based metasurface have great application potential in ultrathin, lightweight and integrated terahertz devices.

Uniform and reproducible substrates for surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) are fabricated by self-assembly of Ag nanoparticles (NPs) on 3-aminopropyltrimethoxysilane (APTES) modified glass. Experimental results indicate that the Ag NPs with a narrow size distribution were assembled as a sub-monolayer which exhibits an excellent SERSactivity. The SERS enhancement factor is estimated to be 7.5 × 106 and the detection limit for crystal violet (CV) solution is about ∼10−11 M. The uniformity and reproducibility of the SERS signals are tested by point-to-point and batch-to-batch measurements. It is confirmed that the self-assembled Ag NPs substrates has a high SERS reproducibility and a low standard deviation with respect to the Ag NPs on non-functionalized glass substrates. The self-assembled Ag NPs substrates can be widely used for the application of chemical and biochemical sensing.

The performances of thin film solar cells are considerably limited by the low light absorption. Plasmonic nanostructures have been introduced in the thin film solar cells as a possible solution around this issue in recent years. Here, we propose a solar cell design, in which an ultrathin Si film covered by a periodic array of Ag strips is placed on a metallic nanograting substrate. The simulation results demonstrate that the designed structure gives rise to 170% light absorption enhancement over the full solar spectrum with respect to the bared Si thin film. The excited multiple resonant modes, including optical waveguide modes within the Si layer, localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) of Ag stripes, and surface plasmon polaritons (SPP) arising from the bottom grating, and the coupling effect between LSPR and SPP modes through an optimization of the array periods are considered to contribute to the significant absorption enhancement. This plasmonic solar cell design paves a promising way to increase light absorption for thin film solar cell applications.

Surface plasmons supported by various metallic nanostructures have given rise to several significant breakthroughs in the field of integrated photonic devices due to its ability to effectively confine and enhance optical field in subwavelength volume. In particular, the demand to actively control optical responses of plasmonic systems becomes urgent for the miniaturization of signal processing devices, surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) substrates and biochemical sensors. In this paper, we systematically investigate the plasmon modes as well as their interaction in a layered nanostructure composed of a periodically-arranged radiative nanoring and a metallic ground plane, as well as a thin insulating spacer. A tunable transparent peak on the background of the broadband plasmon resonance emerges in the reflection spectrum as changing the periodicity of nanoparticle array, a plasmonic analogue of electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT). Owing to the structural symmetry of the rings, we demonstrate a new scheme of controlling the interference between localized and delocalized plasmons by means of incident polarization and believe that the proposed metasurface may find applications in optical switching if the polarization-controlled components are introduced.

Since the nucleation and growth of clusters is usually a non-equilibrium condensation process, a distribution of structural isomers for a given cluster size may be encountered even under the same conditions. In this work, molecular dynamics simulations are performed on sets of molten clusters of Cu309 to study their structures at low temperatures while controlling the cooling rate. Several different final structures including perfect icosahedra (ICO), imperfect Mark’ decahedra (MDEC) and imperfect FCC truncated octahedra (TOCT) are obtained even at the same cooling rate. It is calculated that the most favorable structure is icosahedra, which becomes more and more favorable as the cooling rate is slowed. To better understand the process of crystallization, several techniques, including potential-temperature curves, common neighbor analysis (CNA) and radial distribution function (RDF), are used to analyze and study the structural transition. Results show that different structures are obtained under identical conditions due to the stochastic nature of nucleation and relatively small energy difference between isomers. The process of geometrical evolution for icosahedra is given by comparing and analyzing the time evolution of the root-mean-square deviation (RMSD) of atoms located in every shell.

We proposed a facile green synthesis system to synthesize large-scale Ag hemi-mesoparticles monolayer on Cu foil. Ag hemi-mesoparticles have different surface morphologies on their surfaces, including ridge-like, meatball-like, and fluffy-like shapes. In the reaction, silver nitrate was reduced by copper at room temperature in dimethyl sulfoxide via the galvanic displacement reaction. The different surface morphologies of the Ag hemi-mesoparticles were adjusted by changing the reaction time, and the hemi-mesoparticle surface formed fluffy-spherical nanoprotrusions at longer reaction time. At the same time, we explored the growth mechanism of silver hemi-mesoparticles with different surface morphologies. With 4-mercaptobenzoic acid as Raman probe molecules, the fluffy-like silver hemi-mesoparticles monolayer with the best activity of surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS), the enhancement factor is up to 7.33 × 10(7) and the detection limit can reach 10(-10)M. SERS measurements demonstrate that these Ag hemi-mesoparticles can serve as sensitive SERS substrates. At the same time, using finite element method, the distribution of the localized electromagnetic field near the particle surface was simulated to verify the enhanced mechanism. This study helps us to understand the relationship between morphology Ag hemi-mesoparicles and the properties of SERS.

Surface enhanced coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering (SECARS) is a sensitive tool and promising for single molecular detection and chemical selective imaging. However, the enhancement factors (EF) were only 10~100 for colloidal silver and gold nanoparticles usually used as SECARS substrates. In this paper, we present a design of SECARS substrate consisting of three asymmetric gold disks and strategies for maximizing the EF by engineering near-field properties of the plasmonic Fano nanoassembly. It is found that the E-field “hot spots” corresponding to three different frequencies involved in SECARS process can be brought to the same spatial locations by tuning incident orientations, giving rise to highly confined SECARS “hot spots” with the EF reaching single-molecule sensitivity. Besides, an even higher EF of SECARS is achieved by introducing double Fano resonances in this plasmonic nanoassembly via further enlarging the sizes of the constituent disks. These findings put an important step forward to the plasmonic substrate design for SECARS as well as for other nonlinear optical processes.

Plasmonic metallic nanostructures have been demonstrated an effective way to enhance the light emission efficiency in LEDs. Here, we propose a design of white LEDs that combining dielectric silicon nanopillar array in the color-converting layer. By investigating theoretically the guided mode caused by the nanopillar array-waveguide system, we demonstrate that the silicon nanopillar arrays enable larger near-field enhancement and more efficient photons emission property than the plasmonic counterparts. These performances make the silicon nanopillar arrays have potential application in light converter for efficient white LEDs. We also show that the guided mode can be controlled by changing the period of nanopillar grating and the thickness of polymer layer. More significant performance can be achieved by further optimizing the shape and size of the silicon nanoparticles. Compared with the square nanoparticle arrays, the hexagonal nanopillar arrays are demonstrated to have larger field enhancement and emission enhancement. Our research is expected to give insights into the design and optimization of the solid-state lighting systems by using silicon nanostructures, and the all-dielectric metamaterials for gaining or lasing devices.

Ag–Fe3O4 nanocomposites were synthesized by the redox reaction between Ag2O and Fe(OH)2 in the absence of additional reductant at moderate temperature and atmospheric condition. The as-synthesized Ag–Fe3O4 nanocomposites are assembled into an orderly arrayed SERS substrate holding clean and reproducible properties with an applied external magnetic field. 4-mercaptobenzoic acid (4-MBA) is chosen as the probe molecule to test the enhancement factors (EF), uniformity and reproducibility of the SERS substrate. Experimental results indicate that the EF of 4-MBA on our proposed SERS substrate is up to 5.2 × 106 and the detection limit is down to ∼10−10 M. The SERS spectra of 4-MBA molecules ranging from 200 cm−1 to 2000 cm−1 were randomly collected from a number of positions on the substrate and six Ag–Fe3O4 nanocomposites substrates are measured with the same procedure. It is shown that the SERS substrate have the good uniformity and reproducibility with low standard deviation, indicating our proposed Ag–Fe3O4 nanocomposites with external magnetic field control abilities have potential applications in the fields of magnetic separation and SERS techniques.

A novel planar plasmonic metamaterial for electromagnetically induced transparency and slow light characteristic is presented in this paper, which consists of nanoring and nanorod compound structures. Two bright modes in the metamaterial are induced by the electric dipole resonance inside nanoring and nanorod, respectively. The coupling between two bright modes introduces transparency window and large group index. By adjusting the geometric parameters of metamaterial structure, the transmittance of EIT window at 385 THz is about 60%, and the corresponding group index and Q factor can reach up to 1.2 × 10³ and 97, respectively, which has an important application in slow-light device, active plasmonic switch, SERS and optical sensing.

We demonstrate theoretically an analogue of electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) at visible frequencies in an all-dielectric metamaterial-waveguide (ADMW) system that consists of a two-dimensional silicon nanopillar array on top of a dielectric slab waveguide. By varying the lattice period of the array, we show that the transmission feature of the hybridized ADMW system can be efficiently engineered due to the period-dependent guided modes. For ADMW systems with different lattice periods, the EIT-like transparency windows are confirmed either from the two detuned guided modes in the waveguide layer or from the Fano-type interference between the guided modes and the magnetic dipole mode in silicon nanopillars. We have also demonstrated the significant electric field enhancement in the waveguide layer and the remarkable slow-light effect associated with the EIT-like transmission. Compared with the hybrid waveguide-plasmon system including a metal-resonator array, the silicon-based ADMW system enables production of high Q-factor resonances with low absorption losses, thereby having promising applications in low-loss slow-light devices, bio/chemical sensing, enhancing emission rate, and optical modulation.

A novel plasmonic metamaterial consisting of the solid (bar) and the inverse (slot) compound metallic nanostructure for electromagnetically induced absorption (EIA) is proposed in this paper, which is demonstrated to achieve an ultra-narrow absorption peak with the linewidth less than 8 nm and the absorptivity exceeding 97% at optical frequencies. This is attributed to the plasmonic EIA resonance arising from the efficient coupling between the magnetic response of the slot (dark mode) and the electric resonance of the bar (bright mode). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that the plasmonic EIA is used to realize the narrow-band perfect absorbers. The underlying physics are revealed by applying the two-coupled-oscillator model. The near-perfect-absorption resonance also causes an enhancement of about 50 times in H-field and about 130 times in E-field within the slots. Such absorber possesses potential for applications in filter, thermal emitter, surface enhanced Raman scattering, sensing and nonlinear optics.

Ag nanocubes (NCs)/4-aminothiophenol (p-ATP)/smooth platinum (Pt) film (Ag-NCs @ p-ATP/Pt) sandwich structure is created for surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS). The proposed sandwich structure is shown to exhibit better performance than the Ag-NCs only as SERS substrate. The dependence of the Raman signal intensity on the thickness of the Pt films is examined. It is shown that the Raman signal increases with the thickness of the Pt films from 42 to 90 nm, suggesting the electromagnetic coupling of the localized surface plasmons of the Ag-NCs with the surface plasmon polaritons of the underneath Pt film, which is confirmed by our numerical simulations. The SERS enhancement factor in Ag-NCs @ p-ATP/Pt is estimated to be (4.1 ± 0.2) × 106 for a Pt film of 90 nm.

The resonance amplification of out-of-plane lattice plasmons (OLPs) in gain-assisted 2D metallic nanoparticle (NP) arrays is investigated theoretically. Due to the angle-dependent near-field optical properties, the gain threshold of OLPs-based spaser can be controlled by adjusting the angle of incident light. OLPs are demonstrated to exhibit lower thresholds for surface plasmon (SP) amplification than the in-plane lattice plasmons (ILPs) for active plasmonic NP arrays. Side-by-side comparisons of the E-field localizations and enhancements for the ILPs and OLPs excited at different incident angle are performed to understand their different spasing performance. The results also indicate that the gain thresholds of lattice plasmons in NP arrays are much lower than those of localized SPs in individual NPs.

A sharp plasmonic Fano resonance is found to appear in a silver nanorod pair structure with broken length symmetry. It is shown that it arises from strong interference between a narrow plasmon mode of inter-nanorod near-field coupling and broad scattering from the nanorod. The inter-nanorod coupling is the result of the magnetic dipole plasmon resonance induced by the anti-parallel current of the nanorod pair, while the broad scattering is caused by electric dipole oscillation. The numerical results show that a giant local field enhancement (197), a high quality factor (52) and a sensing sensitivity of 1426 nm per refractive index unit in the symmetry-broken nanorod pair with a displacement Δl = 40 nm originated from a pronounced Fano resonance in the near-infrared spectrum. Huge local field enhancement and high sensitivity make this simple structure promising for surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy and sensing applications.

We report that the gain threshold of a core–shell nanoparticle-based spaser can be reduced significantly by offsetting the gain-doped dielectric core within the metallic shell. By investigating the optical cross sections of the reduced symmetry core–shell nanoparticle with different levels of gain, we determined the gain threshold of the asymmetric nanoparticle-based spaser fueled by different plasmon modes. The calculation results indicate that when multipolar plasmon oscillations excited in asymmetric core–shell nanostructures are used as lasing modes, the gain threshold of an asymmetric spaser particle can drop by 30% as compared to the case of a perfect or symmetric particle. The underlying physics of low-threshold surface plasmon amplification is explained by investigating the Q factor and the optical field confinement and enhancement associated with the lasing mode.

We theoretically investigate the optical properties in one-dimensional graded soft photonic crystals (1D GSPCs). The proposed structure is constituted of the stacked ferrofluids layer and the dielectric layer. Due to the supermagnetic response of the ferromagnetic nanoparticles, they will align in a line under the influence of the initiated magnetic field, thereby modulating the refractive index of the ferrofluids layer. By resorting to the transfer matrix method, the dispersion relation, transmittance and reflectance in 1D GSPCs were calculated. Numerical results show that a broad photonic band gap appears in such systems, which can even be broadened by increasing the volume fraction of ferromagnetic nanoparticles. Moreover, perfect transmittance of our proposed structure can be realized with an increased number of ferrofluid layers. In comparison with conventional PCs materials, 1D GSPCs composed of liquid material offer a very flexible route to implementation, which can be widely used in the application of optical filters, waveguides, reflectors and so on.