Plasmon resonance spectral peak shift due to morphing of gold nanoparticles for strain sensing

Abstract

The plasmon resonance spectral peak of a gold spherical nanoparticle (NP) will shift when the NP shape is changed from sphere to spheroid. This may be used as a novel strain detection method with gold NPs embedded in a medium of different refractive index (RI). Applying a strain to the external medium will cause a change in the shape of the NP from spherical to spheroidal. In our previous work, it was found that when the RI change of the medium surrounding the NPs is close to zero, the shape change induced plasmon resonance spectral peak shift will become important. In order to obtain only the wavelength shift values caused by the shape change of the NPs, the RI of medium surrounding the gold NPs is set at a constant of 1.45 and the RI of the gold NP is assumed unchanged. The T-matrix method is used to calculate the scattered light and light extinction by the NP morphing. The diameters of the gold NPs are set from 100 nm to 400 nm, with the size interval at 10 nm, to cover a wide size range for typical sizes of gold spherical NPs. The spectra of the light scattering and light extinction were calculated on the Delft University high performance computing cluster. The results show that the plasmon resonance spectral peak shift is related to the size of the NPs. Larger sizes of gold NPs have larger peak shift values, but there is an inflection point around 200 nm and the bandwidth of the resonance peak becomes larger which will cause a difficulty in precisely locating the peak.