December 6, 2012
NATURE News recently released the article "Sprinkled nanocubes hold light tight" by Katharine Sanderson discusiing how scattering silver nanocubes over a mettalic film may help harvest the sun's rays. Read the full article below;
05 December 2012
"Just sprinkle on and harvest light — that is the procedure with nanoscale cubes of silver that could be used to make efficient solar panels, heat detectors and specialist cameras.
The cubes are scattered randomly on a piece of polymer-coated metal to form a device that absorbs nearly all the light that hits it. Unlike other light absorbers, it is relatively simple and cheap to make, and could be produced on a large scale for industrial and even domestic applications.
The material, which can be tuned to ensnare the desired wavelength of light, is described today in Nature. It was developed by David Smith, a materials scientist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and his colleagues.
Trapped in a gap
Absorbers that can capture all, or almost all, of the light that hits them are typically made with metamaterials — materials engineered to have particular properties not found in nature. They usually have precisely placed components smaller than the wavelength of light, which gives them the ability to manipulate light in weird ways (see 'Ideal focus').
These minuscule components are painstakingly fabricated in a laborious, expensive etching process using lithography, so the light absorbers are difficult to make in large quantities.
Smith and his team took a different approach. They mounted a thin piece of gold on a piece of glass, and dipped it into two organic chemicals to build a uniform polymer layer just a few nanometres thick on top of the gold. They then made silver cubes about 74 nanometres wide, and scattered them on top of the polymer.
When light with a certain wavelength hits a nanocube in the device, it excites the cube’s electrons, which start to oscillate together with the electrons in the gold film. This 'plasmon resonance' between film and nanocube seems to pull light into the insulating polymer gap between them, and traps it there, explains Smith.
Different wavelengths
The thickness of the polymer is crucial — it determines the wavelength of light that is gathered. Different polymer thicknesses in an array of combined devices could absorb between them a broad range of light wavelengths.
Smith says that his device works just as well as etched systems, and is easier to make.
'It’s time consuming to make a very large structure' using lithography, agrees Min Qiu, who works on similar systems at the Royal Institute of Technology in Kista, Sweden. A square of etched light absorber 100 micrometres across takes up to an hour to prepare, he says, and a patch 1 millimetre across would take up to 100 times longer.
Smith’s system is potentially easier to prepare on large scales, says Qiu. However, before it can be used practically, the team must find a way to make all the nanocubes the same size; they currently vary slightly.
Smith is also looking at using different materials to form the insulating gap, because organic polymers might not be suitable for high-temperature applications, he says.
The method could help to make metamaterials much more practical, says Junpeng Guo, who works on nanophotonics at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. 'This brings the technology to ordinary people’s lives,' he says. For example, the nanocube absorber could be used to make solar-powered rooftop water heaters more efficient."
Nature doi:10.1038/nature.2012.11965
References:
Moreau, A. et al. Nature 492, 86–89 (2012).
Efficient and tunable absorption is essential for a variety of applications, such as designing controlled-emissivity surfaces for thermophotovoltaic devices1, tailoring an infrared spectrum for controlled thermal dissipation2 and producing detector elements for imaging3. Metamaterials based on metallic elements are particularly efficient as absorbing media, because both the electrical and the magnetic properties of a metamaterial can be tuned by structured design4. So far, metamaterial absorbers in the infrared or visible range have been fabricated using lithographically patterned metallic structures2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, making them inherently difficult to produce over large areas and hence reducing their applicability. Here we demonstrate a simple method to create a metamaterial absorber by randomly adsorbing chemically synthesized silver nanocubes onto a nanoscale-thick polymer spacer layer on a gold film, making no effort to control the spatial arrangement of the cubes on the film. We show that the film-coupled nanocubes provide a reflectance spectrum that can be tailored by varying the geometry (the size of the cubes and/or the thickness of the spacer). Each nanocube is the optical analogue of a grounded patch antenna, with a nearly identical local field structure that is modified by the plasmonic response of the metal’s dielectric function, and with an anomalously large absorption efficiency that can be partly attributed to an interferometric effect10. The absorptivity of large surface areas can be controlled using this method, at scales out of reach of lithographic approaches (such as electron-beam lithography) that are otherwise required to manipulate matter on the nanoscale.