Sculpting light by arranging optical components with DNA nanostructures
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Introduction Nanotechnology allows us to fabricate novel materials and devices for applications in all disciplines in science and technology. Nanostructured materials can exhibit striking optical phenomena such as Bragg reflection, (circular) polarization, and strong enhancement of electromagnetic fields (hot spots) paving the way for highly efficient sensors and nanophotonic devices.1 Importantly, access to these and other intriguing physical phenomena encountered at the nanoscale offers great potential for fundamental research. Taking advantage of several methodologies such as lithography and bulk selfassembly, nanotechnology is being driven toward finding novel ways of bringing together different nanocomponents to predeterministically exploit their interactions. For nanophotonic devices to be functional, structuring or positioning accuracy of optical components is usually required at length scales much smaller than the electromagnetic wavelength of interest. For optical wavelengths, this implies the necessity to control matter at a scale far below 50 nm. To circumvent current challenges in deterministic placement of individual functional entities, DNA has been successfully employed to arrange optical elements such as colloidal metallic nanoparticles (NPs),2 colloidal quantum dots (QDs),3
nanodiamonds,4 and fluorophores5 with nanometer precision and stoichiometric control.6,7 Over the past few years, DNA origami and other DNA self-assembling techniques have evolved as an ideal breadboard to fabricate nanophotonic structures, both static and dynamic (see the article by Wang et al. in this issue8). This article reviews the main efforts undertaken to selfassemble optical components to fabricate nanoantennas, metamaterials applications, and nanophotonic sensing devices using the DNA origami technique, and describes the main challenges that the technique is facing in those respective areas.
Optical nanoantennas Optical antennas have been developed for nanophotonic applications to control and manipulate light at the nanoscale.9 These antennas typically consist of an arrangement of metallic nanostructures with an optical response in the visible range associated with the excitation of localized surface plasmons. The collective oscillation of confined electrons in subwavelength-sized NPs, or localized surface plasmons, is of great interest for nanophotonic applications due to their quasiparticle nature and their ability to guide and confine light in subwavelength space. Initial fabrication efforts exploited mostly electron- and ion-beam lithography.
Mauricio Pilo-Pais, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany; [email protected] Guillermo P. Acuna, Technische Universität Braunschweig, Germany; [email protected] Philip Tinnefeld, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany; [email protected] Tim Liedl, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany; [email protected] doi:10.1557/mrs.2017.278
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• VOLUME 42 • DECEMBER University 2017 • www.mrs.org/bulletin 2017 Materials Do
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