Metallic nanostructures are able to interact with an incident electromagnetic field at subwavelength scales by plasmon resonance which involves the collective oscillation of conduction electrons localized at their surfaces. Among several possible applications of this phenomenon, the theoretical prediction is that optical circuits connecting multiple plasmonic elements will surpass classical electronic circuits at nanoscale because of their much faster light-based information processing. However, the placement and coupling of metallic elements smaller than optical wavelengths currently remain a formidable challenge by top-down manipulations. Here, we show that organic supramolecular triarylamine nanowires of ≈1 nm in diameter are able to act as plasmonic waveguides. Their self-assembly into plasmonic interconnects between arrays of gold nanoparticles leads to the bottom-up construction of basic optical nanocircuits. When the resonance modes of these metallic nanoparticles are coupled through the organic nanowires, the optical conductivity of the plasmonic layer dramatically increases from 259 to 4271 Ω(-1)·cm(-1). We explain this effect by the coupling of a hot electron/hole pair in the nanoparticle antenna with the half-filled polaronic band of the organic nanowire. We also demonstrate that the whole hybrid system can be described by using the abstraction of the lumped circuit theory, with a far field optical response which depends on the number of interconnects. Overall, our supramolecular bottom-up approach opens the possibility to implement processable, soft, and low cost organic plasmonic interconnects into a large number of applications going from sensing to metamaterials and information technologies.
Keywords: optical nanocircuits; organic nanowires; plasmonic interconnects; supramolecular self-assembly.