Imaging of Plasmonic Eigen Modes in Gold Triangular Mesoplates by Near-Field Optical Microscopy

Abstract

We investigated the spectral and spatial characteristics of plasmons induced in chemically synthesized triangular gold nano- and microplates by aperture-type scanning near-field optical microscopy. Near-field transmission images taken at plasmon resonance wavelengths showed two-dimensional oscillating patterns inside the plates. These spatial features were well reproduced by the square moduli of calculated eigen functions confined in the two-dimensional triangular potential well. From the irreducible representations of the eigen functions, it was found that both the out-of-plane modes and in-plane modes were clearly visualized in the near-field images. We compared near-field transmission images of a triangular nanoplate to those of a truncated one with a similar dimension and revealed that the fine details of the geometrical shape of the apex on the plate strongly influence the experimentally observed eigen mode structures. We also performed near-field transmission measurements of micrometer-scale triangu...