Near-Field-Induced Femtosecond Breakdown of Plasmonic Nanoparticles

Benedek J Nagy,Péter Dombi,Joachim R Krenn,Zsuzsanna Pápa,Christine Prietl,László Péter

doi:10.1007/s11468-019-01043-3

Abstract

We studied the evolution of femtosecond breakdown in lithographically produced plasmonic nanoparticles with increasing laser intensity. Localized plasmons were generated with 40-fs laser pulses with up to 1.4 × 1012 W/cm2 peak intensity. The damage morphology shows substantial variation with intensity, starting with the detachment of hot spots and stochastic nanoparticle removal. For higher intensities, we observe precise nanolithographic mapping of near-field distributions via ablation. The common feature of these phenomena is the central role played by the single plasmonic hot spot of the triangular nanoparticles used. We also derive a damage threshold value from stochastic damage trends on the arrays fostering the optimization of novel nanoarchitectures for nonlinear plasmonics.

Highlights

We studied the evolution of femtosecond breakdown in lithographically produced plasmonic nanoparticles with increasing laser intensity
Metal nanostructures are central to a wide range of ultrafast plasmonic effects, where the exploitation of nonlinearities require high laser intensities, typically induced by femtosecond laser pulses
Large field enhancement factors can be achieved with the generation of surface plasmons on properly designed nanosystems

Summary

Introduction

We studied the evolution of femtosecond breakdown in lithographically produced plasmonic nanoparticles with increasing laser intensity. Metal nanostructures are central to a wide range of ultrafast plasmonic effects, where the exploitation of nonlinearities require high laser intensities, typically induced by femtosecond laser pulses. Plasmonic field enhancement combined with femtosecond laser illumination of samples can be used in many applications, for example, the conversion of the frequency of light to loworder harmonics, THz radiation, or even high-order harmonic generation [3–12].

Results

Conclusion