Fine Golden Rings: Tunable Surface Plasmon Resonance from Assembled Nanorods in Topological Defects of Liquid Crystals

Elaine Lee; Yu Xia; Robert C Ferrier Jr; Hye-Na Kim; Mohamed A Gharbi; Kathleen J Stebe; Randall D Kamien; Russell J Composto; Shu Yang

doi:10.1002/adma.201506084

Fine Golden Rings: Tunable Surface Plasmon Resonance from Assembled Nanorods in Topological Defects of Liquid Crystals

Adv Mater. 2016 Apr 13;28(14):2731-6. doi: 10.1002/adma.201506084. Epub 2016 Feb 8.

Authors

Elaine Lee^{1

2}, Yu Xia², Robert C Ferrier Jr³, Hye-Na Kim², Mohamed A Gharbi^{2

3

4}, Kathleen J Stebe³, Randall D Kamien⁴, Russell J Composto², Shu Yang²

Affiliations

¹ Engineering Directorate, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, 7000 East Ave, Livermore, CA, 94550, USA.
² Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Pennsylvania, 3231 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, USA.
³ Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, University of Pennsylvania, 220 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, USA.
⁴ Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Pennsylvania, 209 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, USA.

PMID: 26853906
DOI: 10.1002/adma.201506084

Abstract

Unprecedented, reversible, and dynamic control over an assembly of gold nanorods dispersed in liquid crystals (LC) is demonstrated. The LC director field is dynamically tuned at the nanoscale using microscale ring confinement through the interplay of elastic energy at different temperatures, thus fine-tuning its core replacement energy to reversibly sequester nanoscale inclusions at the microscale. This leads to shifts of 100 nm or more in the surface plasmon resonance peak, an order of magnitude greater than any previous work with AuNR composites.

Keywords: gold nanorods; liquid crystals; self-assembly; surface plasmon resonance; topological defects.