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Details of Grant 

EPSRC Reference: EP/K011022/1
Title: Coupled plasmon resonances for sensing and active plasmonics
Principal Investigator: Grigorenko, Professor AN
Other Investigators:
Researcher Co-Investigators:
Project Partners:
Department: Physics and Astronomy
Organisation: University of Manchester, The
Scheme: Standard Research
Starts: 01 June 2013 Ends: 31 May 2016 Value (£): 381,130
EPSRC Research Topic Classifications:
Materials Synthesis & Growth
EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications:
No relevance to Underpinning Sectors
Related Grants:
Panel History:
Panel DatePanel NameOutcome
26 Sep 2012 EPSRC Physical Sciences Materials - September 2012 Announced
Summary on Grant Application Form
The dramatic progress in nanofabrications allows one to create new exciting composite plasmonic nanomaterials. These materials have attracted considerable interest as they offer a possibility to realise extraordinary electromagnetic properties important for optics, communications and electronics. Nanocomposite metamaterials also promise a whole variety of amazing applications, e.g., an optical lens beating the diffraction limit, a nanolens focusing light into a sub-wavelength spot, a supersensitive plasmonic nano-sensor, and active optical elements.

As in any "natural" material, coupling between "nano-atoms" and "nano-molecules" plays an important role allowing one to achieve new material properties and functionalities. Recently, we have experimentally observed several new interesting phenomena connected to coupling of localised plasmon resonances in plasmonic nano-arrays: i) quantized transparency of plasmonic arrays coupled by a thin conducting sub-layer ii) extremely narrow plasmon resonances produced by diffractive coupling iii) cascaded enhancements of electromagnetic fields produced by near-field coupling.

These findings are still under investigation and promise new exciting applications: ultra-sensitive plasmonic nano-sensors, extremely fast optical modulators and nano-focusing of light without lenses. The proposal aims to expand our initial findings into a viable research programme based on our current competitive advantage in exploration of coupled plasmon resonances. We will fabricate regular arrays of plasmonic nanomolecules and elucidate coupling mechanisms in all three cases. The main focus of our research will be 1) to engineer and fabricate plasmonic nanomaterials in which an optical response can be changed with the change of the coupling induced by graphene gating, 2) to elucidate the nature of diffractive coupled plasmon resonances and tailor nanomaterials for label-free plasmon nanosensors and 3) to study cascaded enhancement of electromagnetic fields. We plan not only to fabricate new optical composite nanomaterials and study their extraordinary electromagnetic properties but also to assess some of their applications, which we believe are the most promising and within our expertise (feasibility study of graphene based plasmonic optical modulator and plasmonic waveguide, phase sensitive nano-sensor, etc.).
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Organisation Website: http://www.man.ac.uk