Fabrication of Surface Plasmon Resonators

This paper demonstrates the sectioning of chemically synthesized, single-crystalline microplates of gold with an ultramicrotome (nanoskiving) to produce single-crystalline nanowires; these nanowires act as low-loss surface plasmon resonators. This method produces collinearly aligned nanostructures with small, regular changes in dimension with each consecutive cross-section: a single microplate thus can produce a number of “quasi-copies ” (delicately modulated variations) of a nanowire. The diamond knife cuts cleanly through microplates 35 µm in diameter and 100 nm thick without bending the resulting nanowire and cuts through the sharp edges of a crystal without deformation to generate nanoscale tips. This paper compares the influence of sharp tips and blunt tips on the resonator modes in these nanowires. Introduction. This paper describes the fabrication of single-crystalline gold nanowires by sectioning chemically synthe-sized single-crystalline microplates with an ultramicrotome (nanoskiving) and demonstrates that these wires can act as surface plasmon resonators. They are the first gold nanowire