Surface plasmons, coherent oscillations of electrons in metals that can be excited with electromagnetic waves, are a key component in routing and manipulating light-matter interaction at nanometer length scales. Because of their deep-subwavelength mode volumes and strong field confinement, surface plasmons provide a means to realize numerous innovations such as metamaterials & metasurfaces, sub-diffraction limited imaging, sensing, and cloaking. While the non-radiative decay of plasmons has been long considered to be a parasitic loss, recent research has shown that it can be harnessed for a number of applications including photothermal heat generation, photodetection, photovoltaics and photocatalysis. Despite the significant advances, research in this area is still in its infancy with devices generally suffering from low efficiencies. This thesis focuses on understanding how plasmonic nanostructures can be properly engineered to take full advantage of the non-radiatively plasmon decay process for realizing new functionalities, as well as enhancing the efficiency of photothermal heating and photoelectrical energy conversion systems.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VANDERBILT/oai:VANDERBILTETD:etd-03142016-150208 |
| Date | 28 March 2016 |
| Creators | Li, Wei |
| Contributors | D. Greg Walker, Richard F. Haglund Jr., Sharon M. Weiss, Jason G. Valentine, Deyu Li |
| Publisher | VANDERBILT |
| Source Sets | Vanderbilt University Theses |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.vanderbilt.edu/available/etd-03142016-150208/ |
| Rights | restrictsix, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to Vanderbilt University or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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