Abstract
Abstract This review article aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of plasmonic nanostructures and their applications, especially on the integration of plasmonic nanostructures into devices. Over the past decades, plasmonic nanostructures and their applications have been intensively studied because of their outstanding features at the nanoscale. The fundamental characteristics of plasmonic nanostructures, in particular, the electric field enhancement, the generation of hot electrons, and thermoplasmonic effects, play essential roles in most of the practical applications. In general, these three main characteristics of plasmonic nanostructures occur concomitantly when electromagnetic waves interact with plasmonic nanostructures. However, comprehensive review investigating these three main effects of plasmonic nanostructures simultaneously remains elusive. In this article, the fundamental characteristics of plasmonic nanostructures are discussed, especially the interactions between electromagnetic waves and plasmonic nanostructures that lead to the change in near-field electric fields, the conversion of photon energy into hot electrons through plasmon decay, and the photothermal effects at the nanoscale. The applications, challenges faced in these three areas and the future trends are also discussed. This article will provide guidance towards integration of plasmonic nanostructures for functional devices for both academic researchers and engineers in the fields of silicon photonics, photodetection, sensing, and energy harvesting.
Highlights
In the past two decades, the concepts and characteristics of plasmonic nanostructures have been intensively investigated and experimentally demonstrated
Through summarizing the outstanding challenges and future trends in the field, we aim to provide a comprehensive understanding of plasmonic nanostructures and their applications, especially for the integration of plasmonic nanostructures into devices, and to stimulate discussions and ideas accelerating the development of generation plasmonic devices
The fundamental mechanism and characteristics of plasmonic nanostructures, such as the enhancement of electric fields, the generation of hot electrons, and thermoplasmonic effects, have been intensively investigated and applied into many areas in sensing, energy harvesting and photodetection. These plasmonic nanostructures have been successfully integrated with diverse devices for use in many practical applications, such as surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) sensors, solar photovoltaic and solar thermal cells, IR photodetectors, solar desalination, and color image sensors, for the improvement of efficiencies and sensitivity of the devices, and the extension of detection bandwidth well below the band edge of semiconductor materials
Summary
In the past two decades, the concepts and characteristics of plasmonic nanostructures have been intensively investigated and experimentally demonstrated. When the incident light propagates through a plasmonic nanostructure, e.g., gold (Au) nanoparticle (NP), at the designed wavelengths, the free electrons will oscillate collectively on the surface of the plasmonic antennas [1, 2] In this situation, light will dramatically interact with metallic nanostructures and generally results in the enhancement of electric field around the plasmonic nanostructures [3,4,5]. Through summarizing the outstanding challenges and future trends in the field, we aim to provide a comprehensive understanding of plasmonic nanostructures and their applications, especially for the integration of plasmonic nanostructures into devices, and to stimulate discussions and ideas accelerating the development of generation plasmonic devices
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