The present study reports a novel concept of a direct solar thermal collector that harnesses the localized surface plasmon of metallic nanoparticles suspended in water. At the plasmon resonance frequency, the absorption and scattering from the nanoparticle can be greatly enhanced via the coupling of the incident radiation with the collective motion of electrons in metal. However, the surface pl...

Metal surfaces and nanostructures interact with fluorescent materials, enhancing or quenching the fluorescence intensity, modifying the fluorescent lifetime, and changing the emission frequency and linewidth. These interactions occur via several mechanisms, including radiationless energy transfer, electric field enhancement, and photonic mode density modification. The interactions display a str...

Colloidal noble metal (plasmonic) nanostructures are finding increasing use in a variety of photothermal applications that range from nanoparticle synthesis to bioimaging to medical therapy. In many applications, a pulsed laser is used to excite the plasmonic nanostructures at their plasmon resonant frequency, which results in a peak absorption of incident photons and highly localized (sub-wave...

We investigate the magneto-optical properties of a nanostructured metamaterial comprised of arrays of nickel nanorods embedded in an anodized aluminum oxide template. The rods are grown using a self-assembly bottom-up technique that provides a uniform, quasi-hexagonal array over a large area, quickly and at low cost. The tuneability of the magneto-optic response of the material is investigated ...

Semiconductor quantum well (QW) light-emitting diodes (LEDs) have limited temporal modulation bandwidth of a few hundred MHz due to the long carrier recombination lifetime. Material doping and structure engineering typically leads to incremental change in the carrier recombination rate, whereas the plasmonic-based Purcell effect enables dramatic improvement for modulation frequency beyond the G...

A one-dimensional photonic crystal (PhC) with termination by a metal film—a plasmonic photonic-crystal slab—has been theoretically analyzed for its optical response at a variation of the dielectric permittivity of an analyte and at a condition simulating the molecular binding event. Visualization of the Bloch surface wave resonance (SWR) was done with the aid of plasmon absorption in a dielectr...

The versatile optical and biological properties of a localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) sensor that responds to protein conformational changes are illustrated. The sensor detects conformational changes in a surface-bound construct of the calcium-sensitive protein calmodulin. Increases in calcium concentration induce a 0.96 nm red shift in the spectral position of the LSPR extinction max...

Surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) fingerprints of individual molecules offer the possibility of multiplexing as well as cancer screening. A highly sensitive, noninvasive, and rapid cancer screening platform encompassing exfoliative cytology and paper-based SERS technology is described. The SERS substrate which consists of plasmonic gold nanorods (GNRs) adsorbed on a piece of filter paper...

In this paper, scattering of a plane and monochromatic electromagnetic wave from a nano-wire is simulated using surface integral equations. First, integral equationsgoverning unknown fields on the surface is obtained based on Stratton-Cho surface integral equations. Then, the interaction of the wave with a non-plasmonic as well as a palsmonic nano-wire is considered. It is shown that in scatter...

We investigate the optical response of gold nanorod (AuNR) dimers assembled in parallel on a DNA origami template. Plasmonic circular dichroism (CD) was found to be highly dependent on the orientation of the dimers relative to the DNA axis and the inter-rod distances. Dipole-dipole distances play a critical role in the induced plasmonic chirality. The orientation dependence of induced CD was fu...