Gold nanoparticles self-assemble to make efficient broadband plasmonic absorbers
- PDF / 440,471 Bytes
- 2 Pages / 585 x 783 pts Page_size
- 96 Downloads / 220 Views
ld nanoparticles selfassemble to make efficient broadband plasmonic absorbers
P
lasmonic absorbers are gaining significant attention for applications such as photo/thermal detectors, solar energy conversion, and infrared imaging because of their exceptional ability to concentrate electromagnetic energy and trap it into thin layers to generate hot electrons. These absorbers are a determining factor in the performance of the whole system, making their efficiency and bandwidth of absorption crucial. A research team from Nanjing University, China, has now fabricated a broadband plasmonic absorber with average measured absorbance of 99% across wavelengths ranging from 400 nm to 10 μm. As reported in a recent issue of Science Advances (doi:10.1126/sciadv.1501227), Lin Zhou, Yingling Tang, and Jia Zhu from the National Laboratory of Solid State Microstructures, Nanjing University, and collaborators from the University at Buffalo, The State University of
Embedded within this is a USD$1 million NOAA Bonus Prize to develop pioneering underwater sensors that can autonomously detect and trace a biological or chemical signal to its source. With these, we hope to usher a new era of ocean exploration through which we expect to find new materials needed to survive and progress as a society. Our limited knowledge of the ocean has already given us additional sources of minerals such as manganese; we have found marine life that can camouflage itself, conduct electricity in seawater, or create its own light source; and we have discovered new compounds for the development of medical cures for Alzheimer’s disease, various cancers, and AIDS. Operating in a water environment has, historically, only been accomplished by the marriage of materials science with engineering. Seawater is a corrosive medium, and the challenges of creating technology that can maneuver electronics on and through water, often under high pressures, has called
for innovative approaches. Recent advances in materials are of direct relevance to the solutions for the Shell Ocean Discovery XPRIZE. Graphene, for example, may be used to detect the gas molecules that constitute a chemical signal, paving the way for the novel underwater “sniffing” devices incentivized by the USD$1 million NOAA Bonus Prize. New materials are allowing for the miniaturization of technology and improving optical capabilities, paving the way for multiple small innovations that would map the deep-sea floor and produce high-definition images from the dark ocean environment. XPRIZE hopes to incentivize anyone to try a new solution and reward the most radical new solutions. But this is just part of a broader trend, one that gives us both hope and an expectation that our biggest challenges can be solved. We have the tools, remarkable scientific knowledge and capacity, big thinkers, and anyone can be a part of the solution.
New York, as well as the University of Wisconsin–Madison, created their plasmonic absorbers by self-assembling gold nanoparticles on a nanoporous template using a physical vapor de
Data Loading...
