Metal Nanoparticles exhibit optical resonances caused by collective electron oscillations known as localized surface plasmon (LSP). These resonance bands are characteristic of the material, the size, the shape, the surrounding medium and the interactions between the neighboring particles. These properties have provided motivations for the development of the particle patterning techniques. Lithography methods such as electron beam lithography (EBL) and nanosphere lithography (NSL) are common techniques for particle patterning. However, EBL requires very costly instrumentation and does not cover large area while NSL only produces hexagonal patterns....[ Read more ]

Metal Nanoparticles exhibit optical resonances caused by collective electron oscillations known as localized surface plasmon (LSP). These resonance bands are characteristic of the material, the size, the shape, the surrounding medium and the interactions between the neighboring particles. These properties have provided motivations for the development of the particle patterning techniques. Lithography methods such as electron beam lithography (EBL) and nanosphere lithography (NSL) are common techniques for particle patterning. However, EBL requires very costly instrumentation and does not cover large area while NSL only produces hexagonal patterns.

This thesis reports a simple and cost effective method to fabricate regular particle arrays over large area with a good regularity using a holography lithography (HL) method. Samples of gold particles arranged in square arrays with spacings 600nm, 500nm, 400nm and 300nm were successfully produced on glass substrates by this HL method. Morphologies of the samples were checked using scanning electron microscopy and atomic force microscopy. Thermal annealing was used to study the morphology and optical property dependence of the samples. The gold clusters were found to clog to rounder shape upon heating and blueshifts of the extinction band were observed.