Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (LBNL) collaborated with the Department of Energy Nanoscale Science Research Centers and MIT to create some new hardware and software for imaging nanoscale structures smaller than the wavelength of light.
In parallel with Schuck’s experimental findings, Jeff Neaton, Director of the Molecular Foundry ’s Theory of Nanostructured Materials Facility and Alex McLeod, an undergraduate student working at the Foundry, developed a web-based toolkit, designed to calculate images of plasmonic devices with open-source software developed at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. For this study, the researchers simulated adjusting the structure of a double bowtie antenna by a few nanometers to study how changing the size and symmetry of a plasmonic antenna affects its optical properties.
The article is a bit light on any more details, but they’ve created an interesting looking web-based visualization tool to see the results, combined with some interesting imaging hardware. They have a paper publishing their results in Physical Review Letters called “Non-perturbative visualization of nanoscale plasmonic field distributions via photon localization microscopy” that you can get here (purchase required).
If you find the paper elsewhere, let me know!
SOURCES: www.azom.com and the LBL website (http://newscenter.lbl.gov)
(UPDATED 11/20/2014 to remove backlinks)
