Polymer Nanofibers Embedded with Aligned Gold Nanorods: A New Platform for Plasmonic Studies and Optical Sensing

Abstract

This paper reports the fabrication and characterization of polymer nanofibers embedded with gold nanorods in uniaxial alignment for applications in optical waveguiding and sensing. Using a waveguiding approach, we demonstrated highly efficient excitation of localized surface plasmon resonance in the embedded gold nanorods with a photon-to-plasmon-conversion efficiency as high as 70% for a single nanorod at its longitudinal resonance wavelength. On the basis of waveguiding polymer nanofibers embedded with gold nanorods, we further demonstrated compact optical humidity sensors with a response time of 110 ms and an operation optical power as low as 500 pW.

Fabrication and Characterization of Polymer Optical Fibers Doped with Perylene-Derivatives for Fluorescent Lighting Applications

“…Recently, nanoscale polymeric fibers, with diameters comparable or even smaller than the wavelength of light, are being studied for novel application in the field of nanophotonics. These nanofibers, manufactured using fabrication techniques such as electrospinning, have been gaining great attention due to their potential as reduced photonic structures [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15].…”

Detection of Single Nanoparticles Using the Dissipative Interaction in a High-QMicrocavity

“…The gold nanorod solution is chemically synthesized using a seed-mediated method following Ref. [55]. The resulting nanorods are relatively uniform in sizes with an average length and diameter of 40 and 16 nm, respectively, exhibiting a longitudinal plasmon resonance around 680 nm confirmed by an extinction spectrum test [ Fig.…”

“…The concentration of the particle solution is about 200 fM. The nanorods are naturally apart from each other due to surface charge [55].…”

Graphene-doped polymer nanofibers for low-threshold nonlinear optical waveguiding

“…Furthermore, although field intensity inside the waveguide is much stronger than outside 20 , graphene film usually has to be pasted outside the waveguide 13,17,19 . Recently, polymer optical nanofibers have been demonstrated to be excellent hosts for a number of functional dopants such as dye molecules 21 , quantum dots 22 , and gold nanorods 23 , and have shown great promise in nanophotonics with great versatility and high compactness [24][25][26][27][28] . Compared to most other functional dopants (e.g., quantum dots or dyes), graphene has many outstanding properties including no photo-bleaching, much higher optical nonlinearity and ultra-broadband compatibility.…”