A hybrid Ag-CdSe NC based plasmonic metamaterials

Metamaterials are artificial, engineered materials with composited materials and arrangements of nanostructured building blocks. Silver and gold are the most conventional metals for plasmonic metamaterials due to their... [ view full abstract ]

Metamaterials are artificial, engineered materials with composited materials and arrangements of nanostructured building blocks. Silver and gold are the most conventional metals for plasmonic metamaterials due to their negative-refractive-index in visible and near-infrared (NIR) ranges, and in addition, relatively low loss than other metals. However, the optical properties of silver and gold cannot be tuned for various metamaterial applications. Many research groups have been studying the controlling of the optical properties of silver and gold by alloying two or more elements for applying to plasmonics and metamaterial applications. And the alternative plasmonic materials with improved optical properties over the traditional materials have been studied.
In this study, we discussed the optical and electrical properties of the coupled Ag NCs and the hybrid Ag-CdSe coupled NPs with various factor such as concentrations. We manufactured the hybrid Ag NCs with CdSe NCs that were covalently linked via short ligand on surface of each NC. And the NCs metamaterial was fabricated by direct nanoimprint process in other to control optical, electronic or magnetic properties based on interaction of the constituent NCs. Experimentally, we used spectroscopic ellipsometry to determine the refractive index of coupled Ag NCs and Ag-CdSe coupled NPs. In case of the coupled Ag NPs, the real part of permittivity is considerably lower than bulk Ag as the near zero negative value. Ag-CdSe coupled NPs showed the different optical properties from Ag NCs and the tunable properties with ratio.


This work was supported by Institute for Information & communications Technology Promotion(IITP) grant funded by the Korea government(MSIP) and the Pioneer Research Center Program through the National Research
Foundation of Korea funded by the Ministry of Science, ICT & Future Planning (NRF-2013M3C1A3063046)