Soft Plasmene Helical Nanostructures

Plasmene is recently defined as 2D arrays of plasmonic nanoparticles, which could be fabricated by the bottom-up self-assembly approach and demonstrated a wide range applications in sensing, energy harvesting, nanophotonics encryption. Here, this work further demonstrates 3D helical nanostructures that can from plasmene nanosheet. Inspired chocolate curls-making process, micro-spatula-based strategy developed to selectively scrape substrate-supported free space, spontaneously folds nanosheet into various complex with controlled dimensions. nanospirals also obtained focus ion beam (FIB)-based lithography on free-standing plasmene. Helical structures are robust, exhibiting elastic mechanical properties chiral optical response. This methodology represents versatile fabrication route combining both top-down approaches create soft for potential next-generation flexible nanophotonic devices.