Event interval: Single day event
Campus location: Chemistry Building (CHB)
Campus room: CHB 102
Accessibility Contact: chem59x@uw.edu
Event Types: Lectures/Seminars

Plasmonic magnesium nanoparticles

Professor Emilie Ringe – Synthetic and Natural Nanomaterials, University of Cambridge

Localized surface plasmon resonances (LSPRs) have a broad technology potential as an attractive platform for surface-enhanced spectroscopies, refractive index sensing, hyperthermal cancer therapy, plasmon-enhanced catalysis, and so on. One of the newest metals for plasmonics is magnesium. It is earth-abundant, biocompatible, and has a higher plasmonic quality factor than gold and copper in the blue, and than aluminum across the visible range. In the past ten years, several fabricated magnesium structures have emerged, demonstrating the optical behaviors expected of plasmonic metals.  
Our group has chosen a different approach: we have developed colloidal, scalable batch and flow syntheses capable of size control from ~50 to 1000 nm. Through the year, we have developed a better understanding of the shapes of Mg nanocrystals, in particular the folded twinned shapes, and have developed means to produce monodisperse metallic nanoparticles as well as patterned fabricated arrays. These have been used to demonstrate the plasmonic behavior of magnesium, including size and shape dependence, field enhancement, refractive index sensing, and photothermal heating. Further, we employed partial galvanic replacement to obtain magnesium decorated with catalytic metals, which can drive plasmon-enhanced chemical reactions when illuminated with visible light.