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Amorphous Nanophotonics pp 1–37Cite as

Bottom-up Organisation of Metallic Nanoparticles

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Part of the book series: Nano-Optics and Nanophotonics ((NON))

Abstract

This chapter deals with bottom-up strategies that allow one to prepare amorphous assemblies of metal nanoparticles. Within these assemblies the nanoparticles couple to each other, affecting the effective electromagnetic properties of the materials. As a consequence, besides the properties of the individual particles, parameters such as number of individual particles within the assembly, geometry of the assembly and average distance between particles within the assembly can be used to design the optical properties of a material. It is therefore highly desirable to control these parameters with high precision, which is the art of self-assembly. Compared to top-down lithographic methods the bottom-up self-assembly approach is cheap and enables the fabrication of large area two-dimensional or three-dimensional samples, making it attractive for applications. In the following, after an introduction, different strategies that were used in the past to assemble nanoparticles into defined structures are briefly discussed. Such strategies rely on templates such as liquid crystals, DNA or surfactants. A versatile approach, which relies on charge-driven self-assembly mediated by charged surfaces and polyelectrolytes, is then discussed in more detail. This approach easily allows one to build large scale amorphous layered structures of nanoparticles with high control of parameters such as distance between particles within one layer and distance between the layers. The method is not restricted to flat surfaces and can be used to coat for example silica beads, resulting in core–shell structures. An attempt has also made to rationalise the observed optical properties in terms of coupling between particles within the different assemblies, thus paving the way to the design of materials with novel electromagnetic properties.

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Acknowledgement

Financial support from the University of Geneva and the European Union FP7 (project NANOGOLD) is kindly acknowledged.

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  1. Département de Chimie Physique, 30 Quai Ernest-Ansermet, 1211, Genève 4, Switzerland

    Alastair Cunningham & Thomas Bürgi

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  1. Alastair Cunningham
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  2. Thomas Bürgi
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Correspondence to Thomas Bürgi .

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  1. , Institut für Festkörpertheorie, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Max-Wien-Platz 1, Jena, 07743, Germany

    Carsten Rockstuhl

  2. Ecole Polytechnique Federal de Lausanne, Rue A.-L. Breguet 2, Neuchâtel, 2000, Switzerland

    Toralf Scharf

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Cunningham, A., Bürgi, T. (2013). Bottom-up Organisation of Metallic Nanoparticles. In: Rockstuhl, C., Scharf, T. (eds) Amorphous Nanophotonics. Nano-Optics and Nanophotonics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32475-8_1

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