Ultrafast Light-Controlled Growth of Silver Nanoparticles for Direct Plasmonic Color Printing.

Zhang, Yangxi; Zhang, Qiang; Ouyang, Xia; Lei, Dang Yuan; Zhang, A Ping; Tam, Hwa-Yaw · ACS Nano · 2018

basic_science · Level V

Where this comes from

Abstract

A precision photoreduction technology for the ultrafast high-precision light-controlled growth of silver nanoparticles for printing plasmonic color images is presented. Ultraviolet (UV) patterns with about a million pixels are generated to temporally and spatially regulate the photoreduction of silver salts to precisely create around a million clusters of distinct silver nanoparticles on a titanium dioxide (TiO<sub>2</sub>)-capped quartz substrate. The silver nanoparticle-TiO<sub>2</sub>-quartz structure exhibits a Fano-like reflection spectrum, whose spectral dip can be tuned by the dimension of the silver nanoparticles for plasmonic color generation. This technology allows the one-step production of multiscale engineered large-area plasmonic substrates without the use of either nanostructured templates or additional nanofabrication processes and thus offers an approach to plasmonic engineering for a myriad of applications ranging from structural color decoration to plasmonic microdevices and biosensors.