Simulated study of plasmonic coupling in noble bimetallic alloy nanosphere arrays

The plasmonic coupling between the interacting noble metal nanoparticles plays an important role to influence the optical properties of arrays. In this work, we have extended the Mie theory results of our recent communication to include the effect of particle interactions between the alloy nanoparticles by varying interparticle distance and number of particles. The localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) peak position, full width at half maxima (FWHM) and scattering efficiency of one dimensional (1D) bimetallic alloy nanosphere (BANS) arrays of earlier optimized compositions i.e. Ag0.75Au0.25, Au0.25Cu0.75 and Ag0.50Cu0.50 have been studied presently by using discrete dipole approximation (DDA) simulations. Studies have been made to optimize size of the nanosphere, number of spheres in the arrays, material and the interparticle distance. It has been found that both the scattering efficiency and FWHM (bandwidth) can be controlled in the large region of the electromagnetic (EM) spectrum by varying the number of interacting particles and interparticle distance. In comparison to other alloy arrays, Ag0.50Cu0.50 BANS arrays (each of particle radius 50 nm) shows larger tunability of LSPR with wide bandwidth (essential condition for plasmonic solar cells). (C) 2014 Author(s).