Research report 2012 - Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Stuttgart site
Being small, being smart
Authors
Liu, Na
Departments
Forschungsgruppe "Intelligente Nanoplasmonik in der Biologie und Chemie"
Summary
Metallic nanostructures feature plasmonic resonances which spatially confine light on the nanometer scale. In the ultimate limit of a single nanostructure, the electromagnetic field can be strongly concentrated in a volume of only a few hundred nm3 or less. We utilize such plasmonic focusing for hydrogen detection at the single particle level, which avoids any inhomogeneous broadening and statistical effects that would occur in sensors based on nanoparticle ensembles. This concept paves the road towards the observation of single catalytic processes in nanoreactors.