Crystallinity effects on scaling properties of photoinduced modes in silver nanoprisms

The crystallinity effects on scaling properties of photoinduced modes in crystalline silver nanoprisms with C3v symmetry are studied using a realistic atomistic model and group theory. Among all vibrational modes, photoinduced modes can be identified as those vibrational modes which possess larger in-phase radial atomic displacement and can be projected out by the projected density of states method. We found that the properties of vibrations in silver nanoprisms strongly depend on the particle's aspect ratio (bisector length over thickness). By considering crystallinity of silver nanoprisms, the dominant modes with the in-plane oscillation become several closely spaced modes, and become obvious for nanoprisms with a smaller aspect ratio. The oscillation spectra show that the dominant planar modes are insensitive to thickness change. On the contrary, the atomic displacements show significantly different patterns for nanoprisms of different thicknesses. We also found that, for nanoprisms with same aspect ratio that is larger than 4, the vibrational properties of dominant modes exhibit scaling similarity. By using a simple linear transformation, the vibration frequencies for large-sized nanoprisms of aspect ratio 6 can be obtained by a corresponding scaling factor. The calculated results are in good agreement with experimental data.