Chalcogenide plasmonic-like materials (Invited Paper)

I will introduce two very different chalcogenide thin films that exhibit plasmonic or plasmonic-like behaviour in the visible spectrum. The first film is elemental tellurium and we argue that this plasmonic-like behaviour is due to partially delocalised p-orbital electrons that are readily polarized at frequencies in the visible spectrum.The Te films can support surface plasmon polariton-like modes and Te nanodiscs can support local surface plasmon resonances.We believe these results might pave the way for elemental Te-programmable photonics. I will also show how chalcogenide films can be used to grow silver nanoparticles over large areas. In particular, I will show how co-depositing Sb2S3 with Ag results in a perfect absorber material consiting of self-organised nanoresonators. We call this material Black Silver, and we have used it to detect femtomolar concentrations of streptavidin.