Computer Engineering Commons^™

Tunable Subnanometer Gap Plasmonic Metasurfaces, Dennis Doyle, Nicholas Charipar, Christos Argyropoulos, Scott A. Trammell, Rafaela Nita, Jawad Naciri, Alberto Piqué, Joseph B. Herzog, Jake Fontana

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

The index of refraction governs the flow of light through materials. At visible and near-infrared wavelengths the real part of the refractive index is limited to less than 3 for naturally occurring transparent materials, fundamentally restricting applications. Here, we carried out experiments to study the upper limit of the effective refractive index of self-assembled metasurfaces at visible and near-infrared wavelengths. The centimeter-scale metasurfaces were made of a hexagonally close packed (HCP) monolayer of gold nanospheres coated with tunable alkanethiol ligand shells, controlling the interparticle gap from 2.8 to 0.45 nm. In contrast to isolated dimer studies, the macroscale areas allow …