Abstract
Surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) propagating at metal nanostructures play an important role in breaking the diffraction limit. Chemically synthesized single-crystalline metal nanoplates with atomically flat surfaces provide favorable features compared with traditional polycrystalline metal films. The excitation and propagation of leaky SPPs on micrometer sized (10–20 μm) and thin (30 nm) gold nanoplates are investigated utilizing leakage radiation microscopy. By varying polarization and excitation positions of incident light on apexes of nanoplates, wave-vector (including propagation constant and propagation direction) distributions of leaky SPPs in Fourier planes can be controlled, indicating tunable SPP propagation. These results hold promise for potential development of chemically synthesized single-crystalline metal nanoplates as plasmonic platforms in future applications.
Highlights
Method cannot measure the effective refractive index
Leakage radiation microscopy (LRM), which has been used to characterize the propagation of leaky surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) in plasmonic nanowires[32,33], detects leaky radiation of propagating SPP modes into substrates by imaging of the back focal plane (BFP)
In this paper, controlling the propagating leaky SPPs on chemically synthesized single-crystalline gold nanoplates is characterized by the leakage radiation microscopy (LRM)
Summary
The gold nanoplates are washed with anhydrous ethanol several times and dispersed on an indium tin oxide coated cover glass substrate (n = 1 .52). Polarized incident light of 980 nm from the substrate is focused with a high numerical number (NA) objective (Nikon, 100× , NA = 1.49 immersion, inverted) to excite the SPPs on the gold nanoplates. The objective collects leaky radiation of the propagating SPPs. The reflection of the incident light on the sample can be filtered by an adjustable aperture installed in the image plane of the objective. The propagation properties of SPPs in the real image plane are visualized on an infrared CCD. The corresponding wave-vector distributions are recorded in the Fourier plane of the objective
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