Geometric arrangements of plasmonically coupled particles result in tuneable optical properties that may have many practical applications to communication, sensing and opto-electronics. Unfortunately, as the desired feature scale in electronic systems shrinks below 50 nm, top-down methods such as lithography become increasingly expensive and unfeasable. As a solution to this challenge, we present experiments using the Tobacco Mosaic Virus capsid (TMVc) as a scaffold for the arrangement of plasmonically active nanoparticles into rings.TMVc is an appealing three-dimensional template for directed assembly of novel nanoscale materials due to its intrinsic self-assembly properties. Nanoparticles can be arranged around the disk-shaped coat protein by electrostatic interaction or by chemical modification of the coat protein N-terminus. Both methods result in nanoparticle rings which display interesting spectroscopic properties that can be tuned by the reversible addition of a central nanoparticle.

Solution phase self-assembly: Sub-30 nm gold nanorings on a viral protein template

244th National Meeting (2012)

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