Professor Yang Zhilin, recently made important progress in the research of optical diffraction limit. The paper titled "Plasmon-Enhanced Second-Harmonic Generation Nanorulers with Ultrahigh Sensitivities" was published inNano Letters.

The group designed nonlinear nanorulers that were capable of accomplishing approximately 1 nm resolutions by utilizing the mechanism of plasmon-enhanced second-harmonic generation (PESHG). Through introducing Au@SiO2 (core@shell) shellisolated nanoparticles, they strive to maneuver electric-field-related gap modes such that a reliable relationship between PESHG responses and gap sizes, represented by “PESHG nanoruler equation”, can be obtained. Additionally validated by both experiments and simulations, they have transferred “hot spots” to the film-nanoparticle-gap region, ensuring that retrieved PESHG emissions nearly exclusively originate from this region and are significantly amplified. The PESHG nanoruler can be potentially developed as an ultrasensitive optical method for measuring nanoscale distances with higher spectral accuracies and signal-to-noise ratios.

Professor Yang Zhilin, recently made important progress in the research of optical diffraction limit. The paper titled "Plasmon-Enhanced Second-Harmonic Generation Nanorulers with Ultrahigh Sensitivities" was published inNano Letters.

The group designed nonlinear nanorulers that were capable of accomplishing approximately 1 nm resolutions by utilizing the mechanism of plasmon-enhanced second-harmonic generation (PESHG). Through introducing Au@SiO2 (core@shell) shellisolated nanoparticles, they strive to maneuver electric-field-related gap modes such that a reliable relationship between PESHG responses and gap sizes, represented by “PESHG nanoruler equation”, can be obtained. Additionally validated by both experiments and simulations, they have transferred “hot spots” to the film-nanoparticle-gap region, ensuring that retrieved PESHG emissions nearly exclusively originate from this region and are significantly amplified. The PESHG nanoruler can be potentially developed as an ultrasensitive optical method for measuring nanoscale distances with higher spectral accuracies and signal-to-noise ratios.

Paper link：http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/acs.nanolett.5b02569

Paper link：http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/acs.nanolett.5b02569