Single-Crystal vs Polycrystalline Gold: A Non-linear-Optics Analysis

Standard gold in the field of plasmonics is obtained by evaporation or sputtering and therefore is polycrystalline. Yet, this gold presents numbers of drawbacks such as roughness, grains and ill-defined electronic band diagrams in addition to the lack of reproducibility from one instrument to another. It is, thus, beneficial to turn to a metal production that can enable well-defined and controlled gold parameters. To that end, we have explored the wet synthesis of gold nanoplates which represents a simple and robust means of obtaining single-crystal gold (Guo Z, Zhang Y, DuanMu Y, Xu L, Xie S, Gu N, Colloids Surf A 278:33–38, 2006). The synthesized nanoplates are from 50 to less than 100 nm…