Wafer-scale self-assembled plasmonic thin films

Plasmonic films have become important for many applications including photonics, energy conversion, and chemical sensing, but the fabrication of these films often requires special equipment, great care, and skill. Colloidal metal nanoparticles offer an alternative as they have been shown to self-assemble into highly-ordered monolayer films by the simple and inexpensive technique of drop casting. Using this technique, we fabricated wafer-scale films of highly-ordered 6 nm Au nanoparticles and evaluated them as candidates for plasmonic applications. These colloidal films were found to support uniform and high-quality plasmon modes over the entire area of the wafer. A combination of microscopy and spectroscopy was used to evaluate and correlate the structural and optical qualities of the films. Electron and atomic force microscopy showed that the nanoscale structure of the films was compact and highly ordered, with few defects or bilayers. Spectroscopic ellipsometry showed that the majority of the film was optically quite uniform with some bilayer patches and voids. These were subsequently confirmed by microscopy. Optical analysis of the thin film showed a prominent plasmon resonance band across the entire wafer. The plasmon frequency was quite insensitive to the presence of voids or bilayers. The width of the plasmon band was more sensitive to bilayers, however, and was found to be as much as 15% wider than in monolayer regions. These results indicate that self-assembled colloidal thin films should be suitable for large-scale plasmonic applications. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.