Experimental demonstration of propagating plasmons in metallic nanoshells

In this paper, we show the experimental demonstration of plasmon propagation in cylindrical metallic nanoshells which is coated, via the electroless silver deposition method, on dielectric nanorods fabricated by using the direct laser writing method. The experimental measurement and the numerical analysis reveal the polarization sensitivity of the plasmon modes within the nanoshells. We further characterize the fundamental properties of these plasmon modes by exploiting their dispersive features and explain the mechanism for the excitation of the plasmon modes by identifying their radiative and nonradiative nature. (C) 2012 Optical Society of America