Morphing a Plasmonic Nanodisk into a Nanotriangle

• Published in: Nano letters Vol. 14; no. 8; pp. 4810 - 4815
• Main Authors: Schmidt, Franz P, Ditlbacher, Harald, Hofer, Ferdinand, Krenn, Joachim R, Hohenester, Ulrich
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Washington, DC American Chemical Society 13.08.2014
• Subjects: Collective excitations (including excitons, polarons, plasmons and other charge-density excitations); Condensed matter: electronic structure, electrical, magnetic, and optical properties; Cross-disciplinary physics: materials science; rheology; Electronic structure and electrical properties of surfaces, interfaces, thin films and low-dimensional structures; Exact sciences and technology; Letter; Materials science; Methods of nanofabrication; Nanocrystalline materials; Nanolithography; Nanoscale materials and structures: fabrication and characterization; Physics; Surface and interface electron states; nanoparticles; Plasmonics; electron beam lithography; hybridization; electron energy loss spectroscopy; Thin films; Nanoparticles; Silver; EEL spectroscopy; Quantum chemistry; Electron beam lithography; Resonance energy; Plasmons; Hybridization; Nanostructured materials
• ISSN: 1530-6984; 1530-6992; 1530-6992
• DOI: 10.1021/nl502027r

We morph a silver nanodisk into a nanotriangle by producing a series of nanoparticles with electron beam lithography. Using electron energy loss spectroscopy (EELS), we map out the plasmonic eigenmodes and trace the evolution of edge and film modes during morphing. Our results suggest that disk modes, characterized by angular order, can serve as a suitable basis for other nanoparticle geometries and are subject to resonance energy shifts and splittings, as well as to hybridization upon morphing. Similar to the linear combination of atomic orbitals (LCAO) in quantum chemistry, we introduce a linear combination of plasmonic eigenmodes to describe plasmon modes in different geometries, hereby extending the successful hybridization model of plasmonics.