Visualisation of plasmonic fields at the nanoscale with single molecule localisation microscopy. Steuwe, C., Erdelyi, M., Szekeres, G., Csete, M., Baumberg, J., J., Mahajan, S., & Kaminski, C., F. In SPIE Nanoscience+ Engineering, volume 9554, pages 95540Q----95540Q, 2015.
Visualisation of plasmonic fields at the nanoscale with single molecule localisation microscopy [pdf]Paper  abstract   bibtex   
Plasmonic coupling of light to free electrons on metallic surfaces allows the confinement of electric fields far below the optical diffraction limit. Scattering processes of molecules placed into these plasmonic ‘hotspots’ are dramatically enhanced[1] which is commonly used to increase the sensitivity of spectroscopic techniques for biological and chemical sensor applications [2, 3]. Strikingly, hardly any measurement technique exists for the direct visualisation and characterisation of the underlying nanoscopic electromagnetic field distributions that either do not perturb the field [3, 4] or require complex electron beam imaging [5]. In this paper we introduce surface enhanced localisation microscopy (SELM), demonstrating the direct visualisation of fields on patterned plasmonic substrates using optical super resolution microscopy [6]. The observed strong photo-blinking behaviour of single molecules in plasmonic fields is exploited in SELM to map electromagnetic field distributions at nanometer resolutions.

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