Tailored nanoscale plasmon-enhanced vibrational electron spectroscopy
Abstract
Vibrational optical spectroscopies can be enhanced by surface plasmons to reach molecular-sized limits of detection and characterization. The level of enhancement strongly depends on microscopic details of the sample that are generally missed by macroscopic techniques. Here we investigate phonons in h-BN by coupling them to silver-nanowire plasmons, whose energy is tuned by modifying the nanowire length. Specifically, we use electron beam milling to accurately and iteratively change the nanowire length, followed by electron energy-loss spectroscopy to reveal the plasmon-enhanced vibrational features of h-BN. This allows us to investigate otherwise hidden bulk phonons and observe strong plasmon-phonon coupling. The new milling-and-spectroscopy technique holds great potential for resolving vibrational features in material nanostructures.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1905.12503,
title = {Tailored nanoscale plasmon-enhanced vibrational electron spectroscopy},
author = {Luiz H. G. Tizei and Vahagn Mkhitaryan and Hugo Lourenço-Martins and Leonardo Scarabelli and Kenji Watanabe and Takashi Taniguchi and Marcel Tencé and Jean-Denis Blazit and Xiaoyan Li and Alexandre Gloter and Alberto Zobelli and Luis Líz-Marzan and F. Javier García de Abajo and Odile Stephan and Mathieu Kociak},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1905.12503},
year = {2020}
}