Polymer nanofibers embedded with aligned gold nanorods: a new platform for plasmonic studies and optical sensing.

Wang, Pan; Zhang, Lei; Xia, Younan; Tong, Limin; Xu, Xia; Ying, Yibin · Nano Lett · 2012

basic_science · Level V

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Abstract

This paper reports the fabrication and characterization of polymer nanofibers embedded with gold nanorods in uniaxial alignment for applications in optical waveguiding and sensing. Using a waveguiding approach, we demonstrated highly efficient excitation of localized surface plasmon resonance in the embedded gold nanorods with a photon-to-plasmon-conversion efficiency as high as 70% for a single nanorod at its longitudinal resonance wavelength. On the basis of waveguiding polymer nanofibers embedded with gold nanorods, we further demonstrated compact optical humidity sensors with a response time of 110 ms and an operation optical power as low as 500 pW.

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