Oriented assembly of polyhedral plasmonic nanoparticle clusters

Shaped colloids can be used as nanoscale building blocks for the construction of composite, functional materials that are completely assembled from the bottom up. Assemblies of noble metal nanostructures have unique optical properties that depend on key structural features requiring precise control of both position and connectivity spanning nanometer to micrometer length scales. Identifying and optimizing structures that strongly couple to light is important for understanding the behavior of surface plasmons in small nanoparticle clusters, and can result in highly sensitive chemical and biochemical sensors using surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS). We use experiment and simulation to examine the local surface plasmon resonances of different arrangements of Ag polyhedral clusters. High-resolution transmission electron microscopy shows that monodisperse, atomically smooth Ag polyhedra can self-assemble into uniform interparticle gaps that result in reproducible SERS enhancement factors from assembly to assembly. We introduce a large-scale, gravity-driven assembly method that can generate arbitrary nanoparticle clusters based on the size and shape of a patterned template. These templates enable the systematic examination of different cluster arrangements and provide a means of constructing scalable and reliable SERS sensors.