Browsing by Author "Cai, Yi-Yu"
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Item Light emission from plasmonic nanostructures(AIP Publishing LLC, 2021) Cai, Yi-Yu; Tauzin, Lawrence J.; Ostovar, Behnaz; Lee, Stephen; Link, StephanThe mechanism of light emission from metallic nanoparticles has been a subject of debate in recent years. Photoluminescence and electronic Raman scattering mechanisms have both been proposed to explain the observed emission from plasmonic nanostructures. Recent results from Stokes and anti-Stokes emission spectroscopy of single gold nanorods using continuous wave laser excitation carried out in our laboratory are summarized here. We show that varying excitation wavelength and power change the energy distribution of hot carriers and impact the emission spectral lineshape. We then examine the role of interband and intraband transitions in the emission lineshape by varying the particle size. We establish a relationship between the single particle emission quantum yield and its corresponding plasmonic resonance quality factor, which we also tune through nanorod crystallinity. Finally, based on anti-Stokes emission, we extract electron temperatures that further suggest a hot carrier based mechanism. The central role of hot carriers in our systematic study on gold nanorods as a model system supports a Purcell effect enhanced hot carrier photoluminescence mechanism. We end with a discussion on the impact of understanding the light emission mechanism on fields utilizing hot carrier distributions, such as photocatalysis and nanothermometry.Item Snapshot Hyperspectral Imaging (SHI) for Revealing Irreversible and Heterogeneous Plasmonic Processes(American Chemical Society, 2018) Kirchner, Silke R.; Smith, Kyle W.; Hoener, Benjamin S.; Collins, Sean S.E.; Wang, Wenxiao; Cai, Yi-Yu; Kinnear, Calum; Zhang, Heyou; Chang, Wei-Shun; Mulvaney, Paul; Landes, Christy F.; Link, StephanPlasmon-mediated processes provide unique opportunities for selective photocatalysis, photovoltaics, and electrochemistry. Determining the influence of particle heterogeneity is an unsolved problem because often such processes introduce irreversible changes to the nanocatalysts and/or their surroundings. The challenge lies in monitoring heterogeneous nonequilibrium dynamics via the slow, serial methods that are intrinsic to almost all spectral acquisition methods with suitable spatial and/or spectral resolution. Here, we present a new metrology, snapshot hyperspectral imaging (SHI), that facilitates in situ readout of the tube lens image and first-order diffraction image of the dark-field scattering from many individual plasmonic nanoparticles to extract their respective spectra simultaneously. Evanescent wave excitation with a supercontinuum laser enabled signal-to-noise ratios greater than 100 with a time resolution of only 1 ms. Throughput of ∼100 simultaneous spectra was achieved with a highly ordered nanoparticle array, yielding a spectral resolution of 0.21 nm/pixel. Additionally, an alternative dark-field excitation geometry utilized a combination of a supercontinuum laser and a reflecting objective for polarization-controlled SHI. Using a simplified version of SHI, we temporally resolve on the millisecond time scale the heterogeneous kinetics of an electrochemical surface redox reaction for many individual gold nanoparticles simultaneously.