Naomi J. Halas is the Stanley C. Moore Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering, and professor of biomedical engineering, chemistry, and physics at Rice University. She is also the founding director of Rice University Laboratory for Nanophotonics, and the Smalley-Curl Institute. She invented the first nanoparticle with tunable plasmonic resonances, which are controlled by their shape and structure, and has won numerous awards for her pioneering work in the field of nanophotonics and plasmonics. She was also part of a team that developed the first dark pulse soliton in 1987 while working for IBM.
Colloidal gold is a sol or colloidal suspension of nanoparticles of gold in a fluid, usually water. The colloid is coloured usually either wine red or blue-purple . Due to their optical, electronic, and molecular-recognition properties, gold nanoparticles are the subject of substantial research, with many potential or promised applications in a wide variety of areas, including electron microscopy, electronics, nanotechnology, materials science, and biomedicine.
Surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy or surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) is a surface-sensitive technique that enhances Raman scattering by molecules adsorbed on rough metal surfaces or by nanostructures such as plasmonic-magnetic silica nanotubes. The enhancement factor can be as much as 1010 to 1011, which means the technique may detect single molecules.
Nanochemistry is an emerging sub-discipline of the chemical and material sciences that deals with the development of new methods for creating nanoscale materials. The term "nanochemistry" was first used by Ozin in 1992 as 'the uses of chemical synthesis to reproducibly afford nanomaterials from the atom "up", contrary to the nanoengineering and nanophysics approach that operates from the bulk "down"'. Nanochemistry focuses on solid-state chemistry that emphasizes synthesis of building blocks that are dependent on size, surface, shape, and defect properties, rather than the actual production of matter. Atomic and molecular properties mainly deal with the degrees of freedom of atoms in the periodic table. However, nanochemistry introduced other degrees of freedom that controls material's behaviors by transformation into solutions. Nanoscale objects exhibit novel material properties, largely as a consequence of their finite small size. Several chemical modifications on nanometer-scaled structures approve size dependent effects.
Harry Albert Atwater, Jr. is an American physicist and materials scientist and is the Otis Booth Leadership Chair of the division of engineering and applied science at the California Institute of Technology. Currently he is the Howard Hughes Professor of Applied Physics and Materials Science and the director for the Liquid Sunlight Alliance (LiSA), a Department of Energy Hub program for solar fuels. Atwater's scientific effort focuses on nanophotonic light-matter interactions and solar energy conversion. His current research in energy centers on high efficiency photovoltaics, carbon capture and removal, and photoelectrochemical processes for generation of solar fuels. His research has resulted in world records for solar photovoltaic conversion and photoelectrochemical water splitting. His work also spans fundamental nanophotonic phenomena, in plasmonics and 2D materials, and also applications including active metasurfaces and optical propulsion.
As the world's energy demand continues to grow, the development of more efficient and sustainable technologies for generating and storing energy is becoming increasingly important. According to Dr. Wade Adams from Rice University, energy will be the most pressing problem facing humanity in the next 50 years and nanotechnology has potential to solve this issue. Nanotechnology, a relatively new field of science and engineering, has shown promise to have a significant impact on the energy industry. Nanotechnology is defined as any technology that contains particles with one dimension under 100 nanometers in length. For scale, a single virus particle is about 100 nanometers wide.
Photothermal therapy (PTT) refers to efforts to use electromagnetic radiation for the treatment of various medical conditions, including cancer. This neurotherapy is an extension of photodynamic therapy, in which a photosensitizer is excited with specific band light. This activation brings the sensitizer to an excited state where it then releases vibrational energy (heat), which is what kills the targeted cells.
Plasmonic nanolithography is a nanolithographic process that utilizes surface plasmon excitations such as surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) to fabricate nanoscale structures. SPPs, which are surface waves that propagate in between planar dielectric-metal layers in the optical regime, can bypass the diffraction limit on the optical resolution that acts as a bottleneck for conventional photolithography.
A plasmonic-enhanced solar cell, commonly referred to simply as plasmonic solar cell, is a type of solar cell that converts light into electricity with the assistance of plasmons, but where the photovoltaic effect occurs in another material.
Plasmonic nanoparticles are particles whose electron density can couple with electromagnetic radiation of wavelengths that are far larger than the particle due to the nature of the dielectric-metal interface between the medium and the particles: unlike in a pure metal where there is a maximum limit on what size wavelength can be effectively coupled based on the material size.
A localized surface plasmon (LSP) is the result of the confinement of a surface plasmon in a nanoparticle of size comparable to or smaller than the wavelength of light used to excite the plasmon. When a small spherical metallic nanoparticle is irradiated by light, the oscillating electric field causes the conduction electrons to oscillate coherently. When the electron cloud is displaced relative to its original position, a restoring force arises from Coulombic attraction between electrons and nuclei. This force causes the electron cloud to oscillate. The oscillation frequency is determined by the density of electrons, the effective electron mass, and the size and shape of the charge distribution. The LSP has two important effects: electric fields near the particle's surface are greatly enhanced and the particle's optical absorption has a maximum at the plasmon resonant frequency. Surface plasmon resonance can also be tuned based on the shape of the nanoparticle. The plasmon frequency can be related to the metal dielectric constant. The enhancement falls off quickly with distance from the surface and, for noble metal nanoparticles, the resonance occurs at visible wavelengths. Localized surface plasmon resonance creates brilliant colors in metal colloidal solutions.
Graphene is a 2D nanosheet with atomic thin thickness in terms of 0.34 nm. Due to the ultrathin thickness, graphene showed many properties that are quite different from their bulk graphite counterparts. The most prominent advantages are known to be their high electron mobility and high mechanical strengths. Thus, it exhibits potential for applications in optics and electronics especially for the development of wearable devices as flexible substrates. More importantly, the optical absorption rate of graphene is 2.3% in the visible and near-infrared region. This broadband absorption characteristic also attracted great attention of the research community to exploit the graphene-based photodetectors/modulators.
Plasmon coupling is a phenomenon that occurs when two or more plasmonic particles approach each other to a distance below approximately one diameter's length. Upon the occurrence of plasmon coupling, the resonance of individual particles start to hybridize, and their resonance spectrum peak wavelength will shift, depending on how surface charge density distributes over the coupled particles. At a single particle's resonance wavelength, the surface charge densities of close particles can either be out of phase or in phase, causing repulsion or attraction and thus leading to increase (blueshift) or decrease (redshift) of hybridized mode energy. The magnitude of the shift, which can be the measure of plasmon coupling, is dependent on the interparticle gap as well as particles geometry and plasmonic resonances supported by individual particles. A larger redshift is usually associated with smaller interparticle gap and larger cluster size.
Prashant Jain is an Indian-born American scientist and a professor of chemistry at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign where his research laboratory studies the interaction of light with matter, designs nanoparticle catalysts, and develops methods for mimicking plant photosynthesis. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Royal Society of Chemistry, a TR35 inventor, a Sloan Fellow, a PECASE recipient, a Royal Society of Chemistry Beilby medalist, and a top-cited researcher in chemical sciences.
Sara E. Skrabalak is a James H. Rudy Professor at Indiana University. Skrabalak leads a research group in the department of chemistry which focuses on the development of new nanomaterials. She has an adjunct appointment in the department of intelligent systems engineering.
Single-Entity Electrochemistry (SEE) refers to the electroanalysis of an individual unit of interest. A unique feature of SEE is that it unifies multiple different branches of electrochemistry. Single-Entity Electrochemistry pushes the bounds of the field as it can measure entities on a scale of 100 microns to angstroms. Single-Entity Electrochemistry is important because it gives the ability to view how a single molecule, or cell, or "thing" affects the bulk response, and thus the chemistry that might have gone unknown otherwise. The ability to monitor the movement of one electron or ion from one unit to another is valuable, as many vital reactions and mechanisms undergo this process. Electrochemistry is well suited for this measurement due to its incredible sensitivity. Single-Entity Electrochemistry can be used to investigate nanoparticles, wires, vesicles, nanobubbles, nanotubes, cells, and viruses, and other small molecules and ions. Single-entity electrochemistry has been successfully used to determine the size distribution of particles as well as the number of particles present inside a vesicle or other similar structures
Rizia Bardhan is an Indian origin American biomolecular engineer who is an Associate Professor of Chemical & Biological Engineering at Iowa State University. She is Associate Editor of ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.
In chemistry, plasmonic catalysis is a type of catalysis that uses plasmons to increase the rate of a chemical reaction. A plasmonic catalyst is made up of a metal nanoparticle surface which generates localized surface plasmon resonances (LSPRs) when excited by light. These plasmon oscillations create an electron-rich region near the surface of the nanoparticle, which can be used to excite the electrons of nearby molecules.
Christy F. Landes is an American physical chemist who is the Jerry A. Walker Endowed Chair in chemistry at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She previously was the Kenneth S. Pitzer-Schlumberger Chair at Rice University. She seeks to understand the structure-function relationships in biological processes and materials. She was appointed a National Academy of Sciences Kavli Fellow in 2019.
Vivek Vijayrao Polshettiwar is an Indian chemist who is a professor of chemistry at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. His research focuses on advanced nanomaterials and nanocatalysis, particularly for harvesting solar energy and converting carbon dioxide into valuable chemicals and fuels. His work is aimed at producing value-added products from CO2 to effectively combat climate change. He was awarded the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry prize for Green Chemistry in 2022. In 2023, he received the Falling Walls Award in Physical Sciences. The following year, in 2024, he was elected as a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences (FASc). In 2024, he received Vigyan Yuva Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar (SSB) award from the President of India.
