Controlling the physical and electronic properties of materials through optics holds significant appeal for both foundational scientific exploration and the advancement of optoelectronic technologies. A natural progression involves scaling down devices to the nanoscale, necessitating a reduction in the volume of optical interactions to the nanoscale. Optical antennas, though capable of confining light, fall short due to the requirement of illuminating them with a diffraction-limited focal spot, resulting in unintentional illumination of the sample over a larger volume. In contrast, plasmon nanofocusing physically separates the illumination and the nano-light generation sites, enabling background-free and truly confined nano-light. Furthermore, being a non-resonant phenomenon, plasmon nanofocusing is wavelength-independent, allowing for the generation of nano-light across a broad spectrum of wavelengths or even a white nano-light, suitable for nanoscale multi-sensing and optical switching applications. This talk will cover the generation of background-free, wavelength-independent nano-light and its potential applications in nanoscale sensing and optical switching.
In this talk, I will present ultrastable tip-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (TERS) setup that has a home-built feedback system to compensate possible drift in all three dimensions during hyperspectral Raman imaging. The ultrastable optical nanoimaging system enables long-duration and high resolution TERS imaging of large-sized nanostructured samples far beyond conventional TERS imaging systems. I will show applications of ultrastable TERS imaging of 2D material systems, in which nanoscale characterization of unique physical properties of atomic layer of 2D semiconductors and structural properties of self-assembled biomolecular nanoarchitectures on 2D materials is performed.
Plasmon nanofocusing enables to create an intense nanoscale light source through super-focusing of plasmons propagating on a metallic tapered structure toward its apex. Among various unique characteristics of plasmon nanofocusing, the broadband property has recently been gaining attention in the nanophotonics field, owing to several successful applications such as broadband super-resolution spectral imaging. Here, we introduce a more active way to apply broadband plasmon nanofocusing, which is nanoscale optical switching of electronic states of photochromic materials by ultraviolet and visible plasmon nanofocusing. We will also introduce a few more new applications of broadband plasmon nanofocusing such as absorption sensing.
Plasmon nanofocusing has been gaining much attention as a tool to create a nanoscale light source over a broad wavelength range. The nanoscale light source is generated by plasmons propagating on a tapered plasmonic structure toward its apex, which eventually induces a strong light source at the apex in a nanometric volume. It has recently been recognized as a broadband plasmon phenomenon because it is just based on plasmon propagation. We have recently reported the generation of white nanolight source and its application for broadband scattering spectral near-field optical imaging. We will talk more about recent advances that we made using the broadband property of plasmon nanofocusing.
The confinement and the enhancement of optical fields in the vicinity of metallic or dielectric nanostructures provide versatile applications in nanoscale devices and spectroscopies. It is therefore of great importance to investigate optical properties of nanostructures, such as the distribution of optical fields on the nanometer scale. In this work, we visualized the nanoscale distribution of optical fields induced by metallic and dielectric nanostructures in visible and infrared region, respectively. We utilized enhanced vibrational spectroscopies, such as a mid-infrared photothermal microscopy technique and a tip-enhanced Raman spectroscopy-based technique to study optical fields of nanostructures at the nanoscale.
Plasmon nanofocusing is a phenomenon that creates a localized strong light field at the apex of a tapered metallic structure by propagating plasmons on the metallic taper toward the apex with compressing light energy. One of interesting properties of plasmon nanofocusing is that it can be excited over a broad wavelength range. In this talk, focusing on broadband property of plasmon nanofocusing, we introduce our recent works from fundamental studies to advanced applications. We also discuss potentials of the broadband nanolight source created by plasmon nanofocusing for future applications.
A thin film made of organic semiconducting molecules of diphenyl derivatives dinaphthothienothiophene (DPh-DNTT) has high carrier mobility especially in the form of single layer. However, the carrier mobility can be significantly affected by molecular orientation of DPh-DNTT. Here, we present the molecular orientation analysis of single-layer DPh-DNTT by polarization Raman measurement. We analyzed the relation between the Raman intensity and polarization of incident light, and correlated them with the molecular orientation. We successfully obtained molecular orientation image of an island domain of single-layer DPh-DNTT, and revealed that they have a similar orientation within the domain.
KEYWORDS: Plasmons, Silver, Silicon, Coating, Near field optics, Near field scanning optical microscopy, Polarization, Nanoimaging, Near field, Laser scattering
Plasmon nanofocusing, a phenomenon where plasmons propagate on a tapered metallic structure with compressing its energy into a nanometric volume of the apex to generate localized electric field, holds a great promise for near-field optical imaging techniques due to its background-free nature. Because it does not require to illuminate the tip apex with an incident laser, one can efficiently eliminate scattering background noise by the incident laser, which has been an issue in conventional near-field optical microscopies. To apply plasmon nanofocusing for near-field optical imaging, a tapered metallic tip plays an important role as a base material for plasmon propagation. It is therefore essential to establish an efficient and practical methods of the metallic tip fabrication for plasmon-nanofocusing-based optical imaging techniques. In this study, we propose an optimized tip fabrication for efficient plasmon nanofocusing, which achieved 100% reproducibility in plasmon nanofocusing. Through numerical analysis, we have optimized the tip structure, such as types of material, metal thickness, plasmon coupler structure, etc. Also, the fabrication conditions were well-optimized to obtain smooth metal surface down to 0.5 nm roughness to reduce energy loss of plasmon propagation. Through thorough optimizations, we observed plasmon nanofocusing with 100% reproducibility in more than 20 fabricated metallic tips. Such efficient, reliable and practical tip fabrication opens the doors for many potential scientists working in related fields.
Two-dimensional layered materials, such as MoS2, have attracted a lot of research attention after the discovery of graphene. They are often used in optoelectronic devices in the form of a few layers, which are stacked through the weak interlayer van der Walls interactions. The orientations of different layers and their stacking configurations strongly affect the band structure and thus govern the electronic properties of the device. Shear mode and breathing mode vibrations of these layers that arise due to the in-plane and the out of plane vibrations of entire layers can characterize stacking configurations. Since these modes originate from the weak interlayer interactions, they have very low vibrational energies and appear in the extreme low-frequency range in Raman spectrum. Here in this research, we try to identify differences in stacking configurations of MoS2 layers using ultra-low-frequency Raman spectroscopy for small dimensions of the sample
We propose a new nano-imaging technique for intrinsic absorption properties of materials under a platform of conventional aperture-less near-field scanning optical microscopy (NSOM). In aperture-less NSOM, when a silicon nanotip is utilized and illuminated by the visible light instead of a metallic tip, Raman scattering of silicon from the tip apex can be obtained. Since the wavelength of this Raman scattered light is shifted to 520cm-1 from the one of the excitation light, far-field background signal excited by the diffraction limited focus spot of the incident light, which is one of the major problems in aperture-less NSOM, can be avoided. When the silicon nano-tip is on the sample and illuminated, the Raman signal of silicon can be partially absorbed by the sample while passing through it, so that measuring the intensity of the Raman signal of silicon enables us to observe the absorption behavior of the sample at nano-scale. Because the absorbance of light is dependent on the absorption coefficient of the sample as well as its sample topography, it is needed to eliminate the effect of the sample topography from the absorption measurement to technically evaluate the absorption coefficient of the sample. For this purpose, we simultaneously employed two different incident lasers and utilized absorbance ratio between two wavelengths to monitor the absorption coefficient of the sample. As an example, we demonstrated that two types of carbon nanotubes, which have different absorption properties, could be clearly distinguished with nano-scale resolution by our technique.
Tip-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (TERS) offers one of the best techniques for analysis and imaging of molecule structures at nanoscale spatial resolution. An important issue in TERS is to improve the detection sensitivity of inherently weak Raman scattering so as to observe varieties of materials. For enhancement of the Raman signal, fully metallized tips are utilized in TERS, which enhance signals through plasmon oscillation at the tip apex. However, length of metal along the tip axis is on the order of a few to a few tens of micrometers, which means the plasmon resonant wavelength is much longer than the wavelength of the visible light used in TERS. From that point, if the tip has a metallic nanostructure on the apex, it would give better enhancement in the visible range compared with fully metallized tips. In this research, we employed photoreduction as a new fabrication method to grow a metallic nanostructure at the tip apex. We found a particular property of photoreduction that it occurs selectively at sharp corners, such as the tip apex of silicon cantilevers. Through this property, we succeeded in growing silver nanoparticles selectively at the tip apex. One of the advantages of the photoreduction is that the size of metal nanostructures is well controlled by optimizing various parameters. We controlled the size of silver nanoparticles from 100 to 400 nm by changing the laser exposure time. Furthermore, we obtained an order of magnitude higher enhancement from our fabricated tip compared with fully metalized tips through TERS measurements.
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