Fabrication of surface plasmon resonators by nanoskiving single-crystalline gold microplates

Abstract

This paper demonstrates the sectioning of chemically synthesized, single-crystalline microplates of gold with an ultramicrotome to produce single-crystalline nanowires. This method produces collinearly aligned nanostructures with small, regular changes in dimension with each consecutive cross-section. The diamond knife cuts cleanly through microplates 100 nm thick without bending the resulting nanowire, and cuts through the sharp edges of a crystal to generate nanoscale tips. This paper demonstrates that the smooth surface of the single-crystalline gold nanowires allows them to guide plasmons with lower loss than rough, polycrystalline nanowires, and that the sharp tips on the singlecrystalline nanowires serve as optical antenna that selectively couple light into the nanowire at the resonance frequency of the sharp tip.