Nanooptics of molecular-shunted plasmonic nanojunctions.

Benz, Felix; Tserkezis, Christos; Herrmann, Lars O; de Nijs, Bart; Sanders, Alan; Sigle, Daniel O; Pukenas, Laurynas; Evans, Stephen D et al. · Nano Lett · 2015

basic_science · Level V

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Abstract

Gold nanoparticles are separated above a planar gold film by 1.1 nm thick self-assembled molecular monolayers of different conductivities. Incremental replacement of the nonconductive molecules with a chemically equivalent conductive version differing by only one atom produces a strong 50 nm blue-shift of the coupled plasmon. With modeling this gives a conductance of 0.17G(0) per biphenyl-4,4'-dithiol molecule and a total conductance across the plasmonic junction of 30G(0). Our approach provides a reliable tool quantifying the number of molecules in each plasmonic hotspot, here <200.