Plasmonics: The future is ultrafast and ultrasmall

Plasmonics has been a flourishing field since the late ‘80s of the last century. Given the number of outstanding developments even without resorting to metrics–it is straightforward to address the 2 decades crossing the new millennium as the golden era of Plasmonics. The unique capabilities of plasmonic nanostructures to collect, direct and enhance light at length scales much below the operating wavelength granted them the name “antennas for light”. These features were crucial for the vast deployment of Plasmonics to a variety of tasks, spanning from light harvesting (Atwater and Albert 2010) to molecular sensing (Homola 2008; Saha et al., 2012), bio-imaging (Meola et al., 2018; Bocková et al., 2019; Wu et al., 2019) and plasmon-enhanced spectroscopy (Zhang et al., 2013, Ding et al., 2016). Another recently growing field is that of plasmon-enhanced catalysis, which could be of crucial importance for hydrogen synthesis (Ezendam et al., 2022) with significant consequences for sustainability. Despite its indisputable key role in basic and applied research, the disruptive fallout of Plasmonics in life and society is still mainly restricted to medical diagnostic tools, as demonstrated by the antigenic lateral flow test employed to detect SARS-CoV-2, which is massively employed during this last pandemic. The first clinical pilot study of a device for prostate cancer treatment, carried out by Prof. Halas using photothermal ablation via gold nanoshells (Rastinehad et al., 2019), represents another major landmark in nanomedicine.