Shaping and manipulation of light fields with bottom-up plasmonic structures

A new interdisciplinary topic which aims at self-assembling, interconnecting and characterizing resonant metallic nanostructures able to funnel, confine, and propagate light energy from a conventional laser source to a single molecular entity is currently emerging in different laboratories. With this technique, several orders of magnitude in the miniaturization scale of optical devices, spanning from tens of micrometres down to the molecular scale, can be expected. With the main objective of overcoming the current limitations of an exclusive top-down approach to plasmonics, we present in this paper some recent experimental and theoretical results about plasmonic structures made by self-assembling or surface deposition of colloidal metallic particles. More specifically, the interest of these objects for tailoring original near-field optical properties will be exposed (near-field optical confinement, local density of electromagnetic state squeezing, etc). In particular, it is shown that a bottom-up approach is not only able to produce interesting nanoscale building blocks but also able to easily produce complex superstructures that would be difficult to achieve by other means.