Ultrafast Response of Plasmonic Nanostructures

Abstract

Plasmonic metal nanostructures are an integral part of nanophotonic device applications owing to their ability to generate strong localized electromagnetic fields when illuminated from the far-field. These nanostructures can be prepared in the laboratory with precise shape and size by various chemical and physical synthesis techniques as demonstrated in recent years. Typically, the size of these structures is in the range of few nm to a few hundred nm, i.e., much below the wavelength of light of observation or excitation. The focus of this chapter is to exploit the ultrafast response of metal nanostructures following femtosecond laser pulse excitation. Femtosecond laser pulses are very important experimental probes to explore the material response at an ultrafast time scale (~10-10,000 fs) on the order of the electronic and vibrational wave packet dynamics in solids and molecules. Broadly, after ultrafast optical excitation the system of study undergoes various microscopic dynamical changes which can be monitored in real time so as to understand the intermediate stages before the system returns to the equilibrium.

31 pages, 21 figures

References in corpus (4)

• Observation of Saturable and Reverse Saturable Absorption at Longitudinal Surface Plasmon Resonance in Gold Nanorods
• Large nonlinear absorption and refraction coefficients of carbon nanotubes estimated from femtosecond Z-scan measurements
• Ultrafast photoinduced enhancement of nonlinear optical response in 15-atom gold clusters on indium tin oxide conducting film
• Direct observation of low frequency confined acoustic phonons in silver nanoparticles: Terahertz time domain spectroscopy

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Ultrafast Electron Dynamics in Thiolate-Protected Plasmonic Gold Clusters: Size and Ligand Effect
• Nanocavities for Molecular Optomechanics: their fundamental description and applications
• Doping-Dependent Optical Response of a Hybrid Transparent Conductive Oxide/Plasmonic Medium
• Optical and Terahertz Response of Carbon Nanostructures