Loss-Mitigated Collective Resonances in Gain-Assisted Plasmonic Mesocapsules

Infusino, Melissa; Luca, Antonio De; Veltri, Alessandro; Vázquez-Vázquez, Carmen; Correa‐Duarte, Miguel A.; Dhama, Rakesh; Strangi, Giuseppe

doi:10.1021/ph400174p

Cited by 30 publications

(33 citation statements)

References 52 publications

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“…used mesocapsules and gold nanoshells to study the PE‐FRET in mesoscale, in which the mesocapsules are formed by plasma nanoparticles embedded in porous silica shell with a radius of 800 nm in R6G dye‐doped solution. (see Figure ), and the gold nanoshell consists of a SiO 2 dielectric core (170 nm) and is blanketed with a flimsy gold shell doped with RhB dye molecules with a thickness of 20 nm . It should be noted that gold nanoshells can be considered in the mesoscale despite the name is origin from the nanoscale shell thickness, because Au nanoshells consist of spherical particles with diameters that can reach up to 250 nm and are made up of dielectric core blanketed with a flimsy gold shell …”

Section: Plasmon‐enhanced Fluorescence (Pef)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Plasmon‐Enhanced Fluorescence Resonance Energy Transfer

Zong

Wang

et al. 2019

The Chemical Record

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In this review, we firstly introduce physical mechanism of fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET), the methods to measure FRET efficiency, and the applications of FRET. Secondly, we introduce the principle and applications of plasmon‐enhanced fluorescence (PEF). Thirdly, we focused on the principle and applications of plasmon‐enhanced FRET. This review can promote further understanding of FRET and PE‐FRET.

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Section: Plasmon‐enhanced Fluorescence (Pef)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Plasmon‐Enhanced Fluorescence Resonance Energy Transfer

Zong

Wang

et al. 2019

The Chemical Record

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“…A remarkable improvement in the figure of merit (FOM) of a negative refractive index of a fishnet metamaterial operating in the visible range has been recorded using dye molecules embedded in epoxy resin and pumped by picosecond pulses [35,37]. Although important progress has been made in theory [14,15,34,35,[38][39][40] and experiments [14,15,33,36,37,[41][42][43], there still exist concerns about the viability of active compensation of loss by gain medium for practically large-volume metamaterials [14]. First, it was shown that causality and the stability of the system make the loss compensation difficult without compromising interesting properties of the metamaterials [14,44,45].…”

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confidence: 99%

Plasmon Injection to Compensate and Control Losses in Negative Index Metamaterials

et al. 2015

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Metamaterials have introduced a whole new world of unusual materials with functionalities that cannot be attained in naturally occurring material systems by mimicking and controlling the natural phenomena at subwavelength scales. However, the inherent absorption losses pose fundamental challenge to the most fascinating applications of metamaterials. Based on a novel plasmon injection (PI or )-scheme, we propose a coherent optical amplification technique to compensate losses in metamaterials. Although the proof of concept device here operates under normal incidence only, our proposed scheme can be generalized to arbitrary form of incident waves. The -scheme is fundamentally different than major optical amplification schemes. It does not require gain medium, interaction with phonons, or any nonlinear medium. The -scheme allows for loss-free metamaterials. It is ideally suited for mitigating losses in metamaterials operating in the visible spectrum and is scalable to other optical frequencies. These findings open the possibility of reviving the early dreams of making "magical" metamaterials from scratch. PACS numbers:Metamaterials have led to previously unthought-of applications such as flat lens [1], perfect lens [2], hyperlens [3][4][5], ultimate illusion optics [6][7][8], perfect absorber [9,10], optical analog simulators [11,12], metaspacers [13], and many others. Despite tremendous progress in theory and experimental realizations, the major current challenges seem to further delay the metamaterial era to come. For instance, achieving full isotropy, feasible fabrication methods, broad bandwidth, and compensation of dissipative losses especially at optical frequencies are among the challenges yet to be solved [14,15]. Perhaps, the most critical of all is how to avoid optical losses -especially in large-volume structures. The performance of devices utilizing metamaterials dramatically degrades at optical frequencies due to significant ohmic losses arising from the metallic constituents. The strategies proposed to mitigate the losses include passive reduction and active compensation schemes. Avoiding sharp edges [16], reducing skin depths [16][17][18], and classical analog of electromagnetically induced transparency are proposed as passive loss minimization techniques [19,20]. Constitutive materials such as dielectrics [21], nitrides [22], oxides [23], graphene [24], and superconductors [24-30] have also been explored for possible alternatives to lossy conductors. However, none of these materials have so far shown to outperform the performance of high-conductivity metals at room temperature [31,32]. Active compensation of losses using gain medium has been emerged as the most promising strategy to avoid the deleterious impacts of losses on metamaterial devices. Optically pumped semiconductor quantum dots and quantum wells incorporated in planar metamaterials have been experimentally shown to compensate the losses to some extent [33][34][35][36][37][38]. A remarkable improvement in the figure of merit (FOM) of a ...

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“…Spadaro et al developed an enhanced hybrid design of silica‐Au mesocapsules for in‐situ SERS monitoring using a porous silica shell. Similarly, Infusino et al and Lopez et al found that microporous silica capsules with embedded Au NPs gained strong SERS EFs in optofluidic sensing. Nevertheless, the SERS EFs of these reported mesocapsules only comes from the high density plasmonic NPs, while the porous silica shells or tubes only serve as carriers for plasmonic NPs.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 86%

Biological Photonic Crystal‐Enhanced Plasmonic Mesocapsules: Approaching Single‐Molecule Optofluidic‐SERS Sensing

Sivashanmugan

Squire

Kraai

et al. 2019

Advanced Optical Materials

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Optofluidic devices are particularly well-suited for biological and chemical sensing. Especially, nanophotonic sensors employed in optofluidics have greatly overcome the limitations of conventional optical sensors in terms of size, sensitivity, specificity, tunability, photostability, and in vivo applicability. [1] Equally important, microfluidic devices enable facile delivery of sample solution to the sensing region and allow for high throughput detection. However, the limit of mass transport imposed by the laminar flow inside the microfluidic channel dictates the sensitivity and throughput of optofluidic devices. [2] In past years, various optofluidic devices have been developed using microring resonators, [3] metamaterials, [4] surface plasmon resonance (SPR), [5] and surfaceenhanced Raman scattering (SERS). [6] As a vibrational spectroscopic technique, SERS can provide specific information about the molecular structure by the strong local optical field enhancement generated by plasmonic nanoparticles (NPs) or nanostructures. [7] Most published optofluidic-SERS results were obtained utilizing either 1) colloidal metallic NPs flowing inside microfluidic channels, or 2) SERS-active plasmonic nanostructures fabricated on the surface of the microfluidic channels to provide the necessary SERS enhancement factors (EFs). Plasmonic NPs, primarily based on silver (Ag) or gold (Au), such as colloidal metallic NPs, [8] nanorods, [9] nanostars, [10] core-shell NPs, [11] and Surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) sensing in microfluidic devices, namely optofluidic-SERS, suffers an intrinsic tradeoff between mass transport and hot spot density, both of which are required for ultrasensitive detection. To overcome this compromise, photonic crystal-enhanced plasmonic mesocapsules are synthesized, utilizing diatom biosilica decorated with in-situ growth silver nanoparticles (Ag NPs). In the optofluidic-SERS testing of this study, 100× higher enhancement factors and more than 1,000× better detection limit are achieved compared with traditional colloidal Ag NPs, the improvement of which is attributed to unique properties of the mesocapsules. First, the porous diatom biosilica frustules serve as carrier capsules for high density Ag NPs that form high density plasmonic hot-spots. Second, the submicron-pores embedded in the frustule walls not only create a large surface-to-volume ratio allowing for effective analyte capture, but also enhance the local optical field through the photonic crystal effect. Last, the mesocapsules provide effective mixing with analytes as they are flowing inside the microfluidic channel. The reported mesocapsules achieve single molecule detection of Rhodamine 6G in microfluidic devices and are further utilized to detect 1 × 10 −9 m of benzene and chlorobenzene compounds in tap water with near real-time response, which successfully overcomes the constraint of traditional optofluidic sensing.

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Loss-Mitigated Collective Resonances in Gain-Assisted Plasmonic Mesocapsules

Cited by 30 publications

References 52 publications

Plasmon‐Enhanced Fluorescence Resonance Energy Transfer

Plasmon‐Enhanced Fluorescence Resonance Energy Transfer

Plasmon Injection to Compensate and Control Losses in Negative Index Metamaterials

Biological Photonic Crystal‐Enhanced Plasmonic Mesocapsules: Approaching Single‐Molecule Optofluidic‐SERS Sensing

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