Fabrication of surface plasmon resonators by nanoskiving single-crystalline gold microplates

This paper demonstrates the sectioning of chemically synthesized, single-crystalline microplates of gold with an ultramicrotome (nanoskiving) to produce single-crystalline nanowires; these nanowires act as low-loss surface plasmon resonators. This method produces collinearly aligned nanostructures with small, regular changes in dimension with each consecutive cross-section: a single microplate thus can produce a number of "quasi-copies" (delicately modulated variations) of a nanowire. The diamond knife cuts cleanly through microplates 35 microm in diameter and 100 nm thick without bending the resulting nanowire and cuts through the sharp edges of a crystal without deformation to generate nanoscale tips. This paper compares the influence of sharp tips and blunt tips on the resonator modes in these nanowires.