Selectively Exciting and Probing Radiative Plasmon Modes on Short Gold Nanorods by Scanning Tunneling Microscope-Induced Light Emission

Abstract

We study the plasmon modes of gold nanorods (as short as ∼100 nm) on a nonmetallic conductive substrate using scanning tunneling microscope-induced light emission (STM-LE) with a nonplasmonic tungsten tip at room temperature in high vacuum (10–7 mbar). The far-field light is identified as the radiative decay of plasmon modes on the nanorods excited by inelastic electron tunneling. The spatial intensity distributions of the first three longitudinal multipolar modes on nanorods are spatially resolved on the order of 10–20 nm. These intensity distributions are related to the radiative electromagnetic local density of states and agree very well with numerical simulations. We discover that the presence of the tungsten tip with a high-dielectric constant influences the line shapes of the plasmon spectra and enhances the strength of the plasmon peaks.