Flickering nanometre-scale disorder in a crystal lattice tracked by plasmonic flare light emission
Authors
Carnegie, Cloudy
Urbieta, Mattin
Griffiths, Jack
Deacon, William M.
Aizpurua, Javier
Publication Date
2020-02-03Journal Title
Nature Communications
Publisher
Nature Publishing Group UK
Volume
11
Issue
1
Language
en
Type
Article
This Version
VoR
Metadata
Show full item recordCitation
Carnegie, C., Urbieta, M., Chikkaraddy, R., de Nijs, B., Griffiths, J., Deacon, W. M., Kamp, M., et al. (2020). Flickering nanometre-scale disorder in a crystal lattice tracked by plasmonic flare light emission. Nature Communications, 11 (1) https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-14150-w
Abstract
Abstract: The dynamic restructuring of metal nanoparticle surfaces is known to greatly influence their catalytic, electronic transport, and chemical binding functionalities. Here we show for the first time that non-equilibrium atomic-scale lattice defects can be detected in nanoparticles by purely optical means. These fluctuating states determine interface electronic transport for molecular electronics but because such rearrangements are low energy, measuring their rapid dynamics on single nanostructures by X-rays, electron beams, or tunnelling microscopies, is invasive and damaging. We utilise nano-optics at the sub-5nm scale to reveal rapid (on the millisecond timescale) evolution of defect morphologies on facets of gold nanoparticles on a mirror. Besides dynamic structural information, this highlights fundamental questions about defining bulk plasma frequencies for metals probed at the nanoscale.
Keywords
Article, /639/301/1005/1007, /639/301/357/354, /639/925/927/1021, /639/624/399/1098, /140/125, /132, /132/124, /119/118, article
Sponsorship
RCUK | Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) (EP/N016920/1, EP/L027151/1, EP/L015978/1)
Identifiers
s41467-019-14150-w, 14150
External DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-14150-w
This record's URL: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/317016
Rights
Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Licence URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
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