Nanoparticle plasmonics: from single molecule chemistry to materials science

I will present my research group's recent investigation on how the localized plasmon of a nanoparticle interacts with another plasmon, and with nearby molecules. First, I will demonstrate the use of scattering-type scanning near-field microscopy (s-SNOM) to directly visualize the capacitive / conductive coupling in dimeric nanoparticles and heterometallic nanorods. Second, I will talk about the use of gap-plasmons to locally induce photochemical reactions, and to follow chemical kinetics of individual organic molecules using the gap-plasmons. As a last topic, I will talk about the use of near-field coupling between a scanning probe and graphenes to visualize / identify the stacking domains (e. g., ABA versus ABC-type stacking in triple layer) hidden in multilayer graphenes.