Revealing what’s hidden: optical microscopy of plasmonic nanostructures

Plasmonic nanoparticles have a unique ability to convert light to other forms of energy, enabling applications as broad as biosensing, nanomedicine, (photo)electrocatalysis, photothermal heating, and more. While colloidal syntheses are increasingly sophisticated, even the best nanoparticle samples have inherent heterogeneity in the size and shape of the resulting structures, leading to the need for single particle imaging strategies in order to tease out structure-function relationships. Typically, however, most correlated structure-function measurements are performed serially, in which function is measured first, followed by structure determination. The necessity for making serial, rather than parallel, structure-function measurements stems, in part, from the inability of most function measurements to resolve structure due to inherent limitations such as probe size (as in scanning electrochemical microscopy techniques) or the diffraction limit of light (as in optical microscopy). This talk will introduce calcite-assisted localization and kinetics (CLocK) microscopy as a parallel, rather than serial, strategy for performing correlated structure-function measurements on single nanoparticles, highlighting different strategies for obtaining structural information from all-optical images.