Plasmonic Properties of Welded Metal Nanoparticles

Abstract

Metal nanostructures show great applications in chemical sensing, biomedical detection, optical-thermal therapy, and optical communications because of their electromagnetic field enhancement properties at the visible and the near-field infrared wavelengths. Such strong optical field enhancement induced by the localized surface plasmon resonance is dependent on the configurations and the sizes of the metal nanoparticles. We presented a numerical investigation of the plasmonic properties of the individually welded silver nanoparticles fabricated by nanojoining technique. It shows that the field enhancement factor in welded silver nanostructures is much larger than in separated silver nanoparticles. The size dependent localized surface plasmon resonance spectra and the polarization sensitivity property of such configurations are also discussed.