Plasma dispersion effect assisted nanoscopy based on tuning of absorption and scattering resonances of nanoparticles

Abstract

In this paper we present gold nanoparticles coated with silicon that switch the order between the scattering and the absorption magnitude at the resonance peak and tune the plasmon resonance over the spectrum. This is obtained by modifying the refractive index of the silicon coating of the nanoparticle by illuminating it with a pumping light due to the plasma dispersion effect in silicon. We also report how changing the diffraction limited point spread function through the utilization of plasma dispersion effect of the above mentioned silicon coated nanoparticles allows doing imaging with sub wavelength resolution. The plasma dispersion effect can increase the absorption coefficient of the silicon, when illuminated with a focused laser beam and as explained above it can also tune the absorption versus scattering properties of the nanoparticle. Due to the Gaussian nature of the laser illumination which has higher intensity at its peak, the plasma dispersion effect is more significant at the center of the illumination. As a consequence, the reflected light from probe beam at the near infra-red region has a sub wavelength dip that overlaps with the location of the pump illumination peak. This dip has a higher spatial frequency than an ordinary Gaussian, which enables to achieve super resolution.