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Colloidal Nanocrystals: The Building Blocks of Large-Scale Metamaterials

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Monday, April 20, 2015
3:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Dr. Andrea Tao
CMIP Seminar Series

A critical need in nanotechnology is the development of new tools and methods to organize, connect, and integrate solid-state nanocomponents. I will present our recent work on the synthesis and self-assembly of nanocrystals for plasmonics and optical metamaterials. We show the organization of polymer-grafted metal nanocrystals into nanojunction arrays that possess intense ¿hot spots¿ due to electromagnetic field localization. Metal nanocrystals can also be assembled using chemical conjugation to generate combinatorial nanocrystal oligomers. These assembly methods can be carried out over large areas and coupled with layer-by-layer processing to generate optical metamaterials. We also show that doped semiconductor nanocrystals can serve as a new class of plasmonic building blocks, where shape and carrier density can be actively tuned to engineer plasmon resonances in the near infrared. The hierarchical structures generated by self-assembly of these nanomaterials possess unique electromagnetic properties that we are utilizing in applications such as near-field spectroscopy, biosensing, and optoelectronics.

Contact: Bethany Day