Nonnoble-Metal-Based Plasmonic Nanomaterials: Recent Advances and Future Perspectives

Abstract

The application scope of plasmonic nanostructures is rapidly expanding to keep pace with the ongoing development of various scientific findings and emerging technologies. However, most plasmonic nanostructures heavily depend on rare, expensive, and extensively studied noble metals such as Au and Ag, with the limited choice of elements hindering their broad and practical applications in a wide spectral range. Therefore, abundant and inexpensive nonnoble metals have attracted attention as new plasmonic nanomaterial components, allowing these nonnoble-metal-based materials to be used in areas such as photocatalysis, sensing, nanoantennas, metamaterials, and magnetoplasmonics with new compositions, structures, and properties. Furthermore, the use of nonnoble metal hybrids results in newly emerging or synergistic properties not observed from single-metal component systems. Here, the synthetic strategies and recent advances in nonnoble-metal-based plasmonic nanostructures comprising Cu, Al, Mg, In, Ga, Pb, Ni, Co, Fe, and related hybrids are highlighted, and a discussion and perspectives in their synthesis, properties, applications, and challenges are presented.

Keywords: alternatives; hybrids; nanoparticles; nonnoble metals; plasmonics.