Silver (Ag) nanostructures and thin films are advantageous plasmonic materials as they have significantly lower losses than gold (Au). Unfortunately, Ag nanostructures suffer from poor chemical and thermal stability, which limit their applications. Here, the mechanisms leading to the deterioration of Ag nanostructures are clarified. It is first shown that oxygen alone cannot oxidize Ag nanostru...

Single-walled carbon nanotube ~SWNT! tips have been used to image nanostructures with high resolution. Studies of gold nanocrystal standards showed that SWNT tips provide a significant improvement in lateral resolution with respect to multi-walled nanotube tips and microfabricated Si tips. The nanotube tips were also used to resolve substructure within SWNTs deposited on surfaces. These results...

Helical inorganic nanostructures have received great attention due to their unique structures that could be interesting for both fundamental research and nanodevice applications. Using a tube-in-tube laser ablation chemical vapor deposition (CVD) method with gold nanoparticles as the catalysts, we reported the synthesis of self-assembled kinked In2O3 nanospirals and multikinked nanowires. As-sy...

We analyze the rotational dynamics of light driven nanorotors, made of nanotube bundles and gold nanorods aggregates, with nonsymmetric shapes, trapped in optical tweezers. We identify two different regimes depending on dimensions and optical properties of the nanostructures. These correspond to alignment with either the laser propagation axis or the dominant polarization direction, or rotation...

In plasmonics, the accurate computation of the electromagnetic field enhancement is necessary in determining the amplitude and the spatial extension of the field around nanostructures. Here, the problem of the interaction between an electromagnetic excitation and gold nanostripes is solved. An optimization scheme, including an adaptive remeshing process with error estimator, is used to solve th...

We investigated the intracellular uptake of different sized and shaped colloidal gold nanoparticles. We showed that kinetics and saturation concentrations are highly dependent upon the physical dimensions of the nanoparticles (e.g., uptake half-life of 14, 50, and 74 nm nanoparticles is 2.10, 1.90, and 2.24 h, respectively). The findings from this study will have implications in the chemical de...

Fabrication of plasmonic resonance devices composed of large arrays of highly ordered gold nanocups is presented. The nanostructures are generated from periodic photoresist templates created by interference lithography and subsequent reflow, deposition, and dislodging. The nanocups are hemispherical in shape and arranged in both rectangular and hexagonal arrays with periods of ~500 nm. Their ab...

Growth of a multitude of zinc oxide nanostructures has been achieved without the use of catalysts at atmospheric pressure in less than 10 minutes at low power (65WRF) in an inductive heating apparatus. Scanning electron microscopy shows an array of nanostructures including nanocrystals, tetrapods, telescopic tetrapods, and nanowires which do not appear to be terminated with a catalyst. X-ray di...

In the present study, we carried out chemical synthesis and characterization of Fe3O4@PEG-Au as a magnetic nanocomposite in aqueous solution by chemical co-precipitation of Fe3+ and Fe2+ ions and encapsulated by poly (ethylene glycol) (PEG) in order to enhancing hydrophilicity, biocompatibility and immobilizing gold ions in the presence of NaBH4 as a reducing agent. Nanostructures were characte...