I discuss experimental progress towards developing a material with an isotropic, negative index of refraction at optical frequencies. The simplest way to make such a material is to create a metafluid, or a disordered collection of subwavelength, isotropic electromagnetic resonators. Small clusters of metal particles, such as tetrahedra, serve as these constituents. What is needed are methods for manufacturing these structures with high precision and in sufficient yield that their resonances are identical.
Jonathan Fan et al. [Science, 328 (5982), 1135-1138, 2010] demonstrated that colloidal self-assembly is a means of preparing electromagnetic resonators from metal nanoparticles. However, the resonances are sensitive to the separation gaps between particles. Standard synthesis routes for metal nanoparticles yield crystals or nanoshells that are inadequate for metafluids due to polydispersity, faceting, and thermal instabilities. To ensure that the separation gaps and resonances are uniform, more monodisperse spherical particles are needed. An additional challenge is the self-assembly of tetrahedral clusters in high yield from these particles. In self-assembly approaches that others have examined previously, the yield of any particular type of cluster is low.
In this dissertation I present solutions to several of these problems, developed in collaboration with my research group and others. We demonstrate that slow chemical etching can transform octahedral gold crystals into ultrasmooth, monodisperse nanospheres. The particles can serve as seeds for the growth of larger octahedra which can in turn be etched. The size of the gold nanospheres can therefore be adjusted as desired. We further show that in colloidal mixtures of two sphere species that strongly bind to one another, the sphere size ratio determines the size distribution of self-assembled clusters. At a critical size ratio, tetrahedral clusters assemble in high yield. We explain the experimentally observed 90% yield with a nonequilibrium “random parking” model based on irreversible binding. Simulations based on this model reveal that 100% yield of tetrahedra is possible in principle. Finally, we combine these results and present methods for the self-assembly and purification of tetrahedral plasmonic nanoclusters, the simplest building blocks for isotropic metafluids. / Physics
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:harvard.edu/oai:dash.harvard.edu:1/17467519 |
| Date | 17 July 2015 |
| Creators | Schade, Nicholas Benjamin |
| Contributors | Manoharan, Vinothan |
| Publisher | Harvard University |
| Source Sets | Harvard University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis or Dissertation, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | open |
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