Silver nanowire (Ag NW) films are the promising next-generation flexible, transparent conductors, but their transport properties are greatly deteriorated by the insulating polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP) layer wrapping on the Ag NWs. Herein, we report a plasma treatment strategy to completely remove the PVP layer and meanwhile limitedly weld the Ag NW film at the NW/NW junctions to improve the film's carrier transport properties while not affecting its transparency. Particularly, we found that the dual functions of the removal of the PVP layer and self-limited welding can be achieved for a series of commonly used plasmas, e.g., O 2 plasma, H 2 -Ar plasma (1:9 in volume), and N 2 plasma. Theoretical simulations reveal that the self-limited welding is caused by the focusing of light (emitted during plasma generation) at the NW/ NW junctions, which thermally activates silver atoms and drives recrystallization therein. With a cleaned surface and welded nature, the plasma-treated Ag NW film shows largely improved conductivity and high flexibility, greatly facilitating its application as a highperformance flexible transparent heater (cycling stability, >40 cycles of heating/cooling; temperature rising rate, 112 °C within 30 s at 8 V). Moreover, the plasma-treated Ag NW can also serve as a basic electrode for a stacked electron-only device of Ag NW film/8hydroxyquinoline/Ag electrode, improving its current collection efficiency by 5.47 times. These results suggest that plasma treatment can greatly benefit the applications of Ag NW film.
such as solar energy conversion, [3,4] superresolution imaging, [5] surface-enhanced spectroscopy, [6,7] harmonic generation, [8,9] and ultrafast all-optical modulation. [10][11][12][13] Among these applications, the last one is attributed to at least three factors mentioned below. First, as collective oscillations of free electrons at the interface between dielectric and metal layers, surface plasmons can produce an enormous localized light field at nanoscales. [14][15][16] Considerably, the strength of this induced optical field can exert influences on enhancing effective third-order susceptibilities as well as optical nonlinearities of plasmonic nanostructures. [17,18] Second, a slight change in dielectric properties of metals or surrounding media can trigger a drastic change in plasmonic resonance characteristics, benefiting the all-optical modulation. [19,20] Finally, the temporal behavior of optical properties of metals varies extremely fast, ranging from tens of femtoseconds to a few picoseconds in electron-electron or electron-phonon interactions, depending on hot-electron relaxation processes involved. [21][22][23][24] In recent decades, some pioneering studies regarding the ultrafast optical nonlinearity in various plasmonic nanostructures have been reported. In their studies, two types of pumpprobe schemes are primarily adopted. In one type, the sample is excited by the pump light whose wavelength distances afar from the plasmonic resonance wavelength, and then the nonlinear optical response at plasmonic mode is probed. [17,[25][26][27] In the other, the pump-light wavelength is situated near the plasmonic resonance wavelength, and subsequently the nonlinear optical response at this mode is probed. [28][29][30] In general, however, at least two plasmonic modes exist in a plasmonic structure. Especially, for periodic structures, both LSPR and SPP modes may coexist. [31,32] Currently, a critical phenomenon, in which nonlinear optical responses at other modes are affected upon the excitation of one mode, has lacked the exploration and understanding. In this proposed study, we first embark this exploration and attempt to understand these phenomena by conducting both experiments and simulations. Then from these results, an anomaly that depicts an unexpected relationship between the probed transient reflectance and the polarization angle is discovered. Next, we proceed to identify mechanisms that govern this anomaly. Finally, future applications of this anomaly to the signal-processing industry and academia are presented.Due to the existence of surface plasmon resonances, enormous nonlinear optical effects are generated by plasmonic nanostructures, leading to the trend in which these nanostructures have gradually become ideal platforms for alloptical manipulations. Here, it is discovered that an anomaly of the relationship between the sample reflectance and the pump-light polarization angle occurs at the localized surface plasmons mode. Relatively, normal relationships exist at the interband transition and t...
The gigahertz acoustic vibration of nano-optomechanical systems plays an indispensable role in all-optical manipulation of light, quantum control of mechanical modes, on-chip data processing, and optomechanical sensing. However, the high optical, thermal, and mechanical energy losses severely limit the development of nano-optomechanical metasurfaces. Here, we demonstrated a high-quality 5 GHz optoacoustic vibration and ultrafast optomechanical all-optical manipulation in a sub-5 nm tip-supported nano-optomechanical metasurface (TSNOMS). The physical rationale is that the design of the semi-suspended metasurface supported by nanotips of <5 nm enhances the optical energy input into the metasurface and closes the mechanical and thermal output loss channels, result in dramatically improvement of the optomechanical conversion efficiency and oscillation quality of the metasurface. The design strategy of a multichannel-loss-mitigating semi-suspended metasurface can be generalized to performance improvements of on-chip processed nano-optomechanical systems. Applications include all-optical operation of nanomechanical systems, reconfigurable nanophotonic devices, optomechanical sensing, and nonlinear and self-adaptive photonic functionalities.
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