SKM 2023 – scientific programme

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O: Fachverband Oberflächenphysik

O 70: Poster: Plasmonics and Nanooptics II

O 70.2: Poster

Wednesday, March 29, 2023, 18:00–20:00, P2/EG

In-Situ TEM Study of Structural and Optical Changes by Laser-Induced Grain-Growth — •Jakob Hagen, Murat Sivis, and Claus Ropers — Max-Planck-Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences, Göttingen, Germany

Resonantly excited surface-plasmons (SP) can be exploited in various scientific fields [1] and have thus sparked widespread attention. One major characteristic of these collective free-electron oscillations is the ability to localize and enhance electromagnetic fields beyond the diffraction limit [2]. Here, we created Aluminum nanodiscs by electron beam lithography (EBL), which are poly-crystalline in nature. In general, single-crystalline structures are preferred because high optical quality can be obtained due to the absence of propagation-damping grain boundaries [3]. Using annealing in an ultrafast transmission electron microscope (TEM) with a pulsed laser source, a grain-growth process could be driven where the boundary migration was observed frame by frame. Upon illumination, the number of grains reduced drastically, leading to almost perfect mono-crystals while preserving the shape. In addition, optical characterization of SPs by photon-induced near-field electron microscopy (PINEM) [4] was carried out before and after annealing. Our approach fuses the precise, nanometric positioning from EBL with the benefits of mono-crystalline plasmonics [5].

[1] S. Lal et al., Nat. Photonics 1, 641-648 (2007), [2] K. B. Crozier et al., J. Appl. Phys., 94, 4632 (2003), [3] M. Bosman et al., Sci. Rep. 4, 5537 (2014), [4] L. Piazza et al., Nat. Commun. 6, 6407 (2015), [5] J.-S. Huang, Nat. Commun., 1:150 (2010)