Tuesday, 13th May 2008 (1535 views)

Nanostructured gold surfaces with omnidirectional light absorption properties have been created by researchers in Europe.

Materials Today reports that scientists in France, Spain and the UK have created nanostructured metal surfaces that absorb light from any direction.

Such surfaces have a number of applications, including preventing crosstalk in optical interconnects and in thermal light emitters, the publication observes.

The researchers fabricated nanoporous surfaces, electrodepositing Au over a monolayer of latex spheres on an Au substrate.

A smooth cone is formed as the gold develops around these latex spheres, leaving buried spherical voids when the latex is removed.

This void effectively traps light until it has been absorbed, the report explains.

"The familiar metallic look of Au becomes as black as it gets, whichever way we observe it from," says F Javier Garcia de Abajo, from the Instituto de Optica – CSIC, in Spain.

In related news, researchers at Brown University recently embedded gold nanoparticles into tissue culture in order to create a new dye-free optical probe.

 

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