Published November 3, 2017 | Version v1
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Report Femtosecond laser reshaping yields gold nanorods with ultranarrow surface plasmon resonances

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The irradiation of gold nanorod colloids with a femtosecond laser can be tuned to induce controlled nanorod reshaping, yielding colloids with exceptionally narrow localized surface plasmon resonance bands. The process relies on a regime characterized by a gentle multishot reduction of the aspect ratio, whereas the rod shape and volume are barely affected. Successful reshaping can only occur within a narrow window of the heat dissipation rate: Low cooling rates lead to drastic morphological changes, and fast cooling has nearly no effect. Hence, a delicate balance must be achieved between irradiation fluence and surface density of the surfactant on the nanorods. This perfection process is appealing because it provides a simple, fast, reproducible, and scalable route toward gold nanorods with an optical response of exceptional quality, near the theoretical limit.

Notes

This work was funded by the Spanish MINECO (Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness; grants CTQ2012-37404-C02-01, MAT2013-46101-R, MAT2014-59678-R, ENE2015-70300-C3-3-R, and CTQ2015-65033-P), the EUROfusion Consortium (AWP15-ENR-01/CEA-02), the Madrid Regional Government (S2013/MIT-2775 and S2013/MIT-2807), and the European Research Council (ERC Advanced Grant 267867, Plasmaquo). A.G.-M. and G.G.-R. respectively acknowledge receipt of Ramón y Cajal and FPI (Formación de Personal Investigador) fellowships from the Spanish MINECO. P.D.-N. acknowledges receipt of a fellowship from the Madrid Regional Government. The authors acknowledge the computer resources and technical assistance provided by CESVIMA (Centro de Supercomputación y Visualización de Madrid, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid) and the facilities provided by the Center for Ultrafast Lasers and the National Center of Microscopy (Universidad Complutense de Madrid). All results are reported in the main paper and supplementary materials.

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Funding

PLASMAQUO – Development of plasmonic quorum sensors for understanding bacterial-eukaryotic cell relations 267867
European Commission