Optical transport and sensing in plexcitonic nanocavities

We present a theoretical study of the optical properties of a strongly coupled metallic dimer when an ensemble of molecules is placed in the inter-particle cavity. The linking molecules are characterized by an excitonic transition which couples to the Bonding Dimer Plasmon (BDP) and the Bonding Quadrupolar Plasmon (BQP) resonances, arising from the hybridization of the dipolar and quadrupolar modes of the individual nanoparticles, respectively. As a consequence, both modes split into two coupled plasmon-exciton modes, so called plexcitons. The Charge Transfer Plasmon (CTP) resonance, involving plasmonic oscillations of the dimer as a whole, arises when the conductance of the excitonic junction is above a threshold value. The possibility of exploiting plexcitonic resonances for sensing is explored in detail. We find high sensitivity to the environment when different dielectric embedding media are considered. Contrary to standard methods, we propose a new framework for effective sensing based on the relative intensity of plexcitonic peaks. (C) 2013 Optical Society of America