Seminar Beniamino Sciacca

The discovery of extreme light confinement in metallic nanostructures gave rise to plasmonics, one of the most prolific research fields of recent decades. Two distinct approaches have emerged: top-down fabrication of arbitrarily shaped nanostructures, often limited by poor material quality and scaling issues, and bottom-up colloidal synthesis of high-quality single-crystal nanoparticles, which lacks geometric versatility.  Combining colloidal synthesis with templated self-assembly offers a promising route to bridge this gap, but several barriers have to be lifted. In this talk I will present the efforts of our team in meeting these challenges. I will present recent advances on the processing of colloidal nanocrystals into macroscopic devices such as optical metasurfaces or transparent conducting electrodes, with focus on the mechanisms and the metrology tools that can be used to unravel interactions at the nanoscale. In the second part, I will discuss the opportunities of substrate-supported nanoparticles to study crystal growth, with focus on liquid-phase epitaxy and nanogap-driven growth.