Events

Dr. Elefterios Lidorikis, Plasmonics for Enhanced Light Harvesting and Spectroscopy Applications

Date: Tuesday 2 October 2012 14:30 - 15:30

Location: SEMS SEMINAR ROOM

Plasmonics for Enhanced Light Harvesting and Spectroscopy Applications

Dr. Elefterios Lidorikis
Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Ioannina, Ioannina 45110, Greece
web:http://cmsl.materials.uoi.gr/lidorikis

Metallic nanoparticles are of great interest for a variety of technological and biomedical applications. They exhibit strong absorption and field enhancement at their surface plasmon resonance (SPR) frequency [1], leading to important applications in enhanced light harvesting [2], spectroscopy, fluorescence, chemical and biological sensing, catalysis [1]. When placed in arrays, they are capable of guiding light at the extreme sub-wavelength limit, leading to applications in nanophotonic integrated circuits.
I will review our recent theoretical considerations and numerical calculations for utilizing metallic nanoparticles to enhance absorption in light harvesting and spectroscopy applications. The main property of surface plasmons that we utilize is their enhanced near fields. By assuming a dipole approximation for the plasmon resonance we derive simple and intuitive expressions for the absorption enhancement they are expected to promote in their host material [3, 4]. These expressions apply for complex nanoparticle dispersions of different volume filling ratios, core/shell geometries, even mixtures of different metals, and are expected to be very useful in designing advanced plasmonic organic photovoltaics. Also, and supported by extensive numerical calculations, we explore the use of plasmonics for other light-harvesting and spectroscopy applications such as high-temperature solar collectors, graphene-based photodetectors and surface-enhanced Raman scattering [5]. I will close by briefly reviewing some exciting applications that we recently designed and demonstrated, such as plasmon-based optical encoding [6] and a bare-eye nanometer-scale thickness and contamination indicator [7].

[1] S.A. Maier, Plasmonics: Fundamentals and Applications. Springer, New York 2007.
[2] H.A Atwater and A. Polman, “Plasmonics for improved photovoltaic devices”, Nat. Mater. 9, 205 (2010).
[3] N. Lagos et al., “Theory of Plasmonic Near-Field Enhanced Absorption in Solar Cells”, Appl. Phys. Lett. 99, 063304 (2011).
[4] E. Lidorikis, “Modeling of Enhanced Absorption and Raman Scattering Caused by Plasmonic Nanoparticle Near Fields”, J. Quant. Spectr. Rad. Transf. (2012), DOI: 10.1016/j.jqsrt.2012.04.004
[5] F. Schedin et al., “Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy of Graphene”, ACS Nano 4, 5617(2010).
[6] A. Siozios et al., “Optical Encoding by Plasmon-based Patterning: Inorganic Materials Become Photosensitive”, Nano Letters 12, 259 (2012).
[7] N.T. Panagiotopoulos et al., “Bare-Eye View at the Nanoscale: a New Visual Interferometric Multi-Indicator (VIMI)”, ACS Appl. Mater. Interfaces 2, 3052 (2010).

Contact:Henri Huijberts
Email:h.j.c.huijberts@qmul.ac.uk