ABSTRACT
Self-assembled nanoplasmonics is a new interdisciplinary topic that aims at self-assembling, interconnecting, and characterizing resonant metallic nanostructures that are able to funnel, con ne, and propagate light energy from a conventional laser source to a single molecular entity. Following this paradigm, several orders of magnitude in the miniaturization scale of optical devices, spanning from tens of micrometers down to the molecular scale can be expected. In this chapter, we describe some recent experimental and theoretical results on plasmonic structures made by self-assembly or surface deposition of colloidal metallic particles with the main objective of overcoming the current limitations of an exclusive top-down approach of plasmonics. More speci cally, the interest of these objects for tailoring original near- eld optical properties will be exposed (near- eld optical con nement, local density of electromagnetic state squeezing, etc.). In particular, it is shown that a bottomup approach is not only able to produce interesting nanoscale metallic building blocks and design their optical properties but is also able to easily produce complex superstructures that can bridge the submicron range gap between nanofabricated structures and single colloids, and which would be di cult to achieve by other means.
