Optically and electrically driven nanoantennas

• Monika Fleischer,
• Dai Zhang and
• Alfred J. Meixner

Beilstein J. Nanotechnol. 2020, 11, 1542–1545, doi:10.3762/bjnano.11.136

• , Germany 10.3762/bjnano.11.136 Keywords: active plasmonics; electrically driven nanoantenna; gap antenna; nanoantenna; nanofabrication; nanospectroscopy; nano-photonics; optical antenna; second harmonic generation; sensing; scanning tip; surface-enhanced infrared absorption (SEIRA); surface-enhanced Raman

• subject. Energy-level engineering in the gap by introducing molecules into the tunnel junction provides an additional handle to modulate photon emission from an electrically controlled optical antenna. Light emission by tunneling through a single molecule opens the door to combine electronics and quantum

Revealing the local crystallinity of single silicon core–shell nanowires using tip-enhanced Raman spectroscopy

• Marius van den Berg,
• Ardeshir Moeinian,
• Arne Kobald,
• Yu-Ting Chen,
• Anke Horneber,
• Steffen Strehle,
• Alfred J. Meixner and
• Dai Zhang

Beilstein J. Nanotechnol. 2020, 11, 1147–1156, doi:10.3762/bjnano.11.99

• antenna. This nanoantenna is typically made by chemical etching of a thin Ag or Au wire or by evaporating a Ag or Au thin film on AFM tips. The tip works like an optical antenna when it is brought as close as a few nanometers to the sample surface and when it is illuminated with a tightly focused laser

Directional light beams by design from electrically driven elliptical slit antennas

• Shuiyan Cao,
• Eric Le Moal,
• Quanbo Jiang,
• Aurélien Drezet,
• Serge Huant,
• Jean-Paul Hugonin,
• Gérald Dujardin and
• Elizabeth Boer-Duchemin

Beilstein J. Nanotechnol. 2018, 9, 2361–2371, doi:10.3762/bjnano.9.221

• emission direction of the beam is determined by the microstructure eccentricity. A very simple, broadband, optical antenna design is used, which consists of a single elliptical slit etched into a gold film. The light beam source is driven by an electrical nanosource of surface plasmon polaritons (SPP) that

• is located at one focus of the ellipse. In this study, SPPs are generated through inelastic electron tunneling between a gold surface and the tip of a scanning tunneling microscope. Keywords: elliptical antenna; inelastic electron tunneling; optical antenna; plasmonics; scanning tunneling microscopy

Self-assembled quasi-hexagonal arrays of gold nanoparticles with small gaps for surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy

• Emre Gürdal,
• Simon Dickreuter,
• Fatima Noureddine,
• Pascal Bieschke,
• Dieter P. Kern and
• Monika Fleischer

Beilstein J. Nanotechnol. 2018, 9, 1977–1985, doi:10.3762/bjnano.9.188

• lithography; optical antenna; self-assembly; SERS; Introduction Over the last decades self-assembled layers of gold nanoparticles have taken an important role in emerging nanotechnologies. Noble metal nanoparticles show localized surface plasmon polariton resonances (LSPRs) in the visible and infrared

Electromigrated electrical optical antennas for transducing electrons and photons at the nanoscale

• Arindam Dasgupta,
• Mickaël Buret,
• Nicolas Cazier,
• Marie-Maxime Mennemanteuil,
• Reinaldo Chacon,
• Kamal Hammani,
• Jean-Claude Weeber,
• Juan Arocas,
• Laurent Markey,
• Gérard Colas des Francs,
• Alexander Uskov,
• Igor Smetanin and
• Alexandre Bouhelier

Beilstein J. Nanotechnol. 2018, 9, 1964–1976, doi:10.3762/bjnano.9.187

• for producing these functional units based upon the electromigration of metal constrictions. Results: We combine multiple nanofabrication steps to realize in-plane tunneling junctions made of two gold electrodes, separated by a sub-nanometer gap acting as the feedgap of an optical antenna. We

• connected optical antenna is a Au constriction formed between two fan-out electrodes laying on a glass cover slip. We use electron-beam lithography and standard physical vapor deposition to produce gold constrictions and the proximity electrodes. The thickness of the Au layer is typically 50 nm, and we use

• lithography, respectively. Each electrode is connected to a common ground (centered square) and can be individually addressed by a set of peripheral electrodes. To create a tunnel junction that will eventually form the active feedgap of an optical antenna, we perform an operator-controlled electromigration of

Optical near-fields & nearfield optics

• Alfred J. Meixner and
• Paul Leiderer

Beilstein J. Nanotechnol. 2014, 5, 186–187, doi:10.3762/bjnano.5.19

• “optical antenna”. Since the fabrication of suitable structures with electron beam or focused ion beam lithography is a tedious and time-consuming task, the experiments are more and more supported by modeling with numerical methods such as Finite Difference Time Domain (FDTD) and Discrete Dipole