Colloidal self-assembly combined with templated surfaces holds the promise of fabricating large area devices in a low cost facile manner. This directed assembly approach improves the complexity of assemblies that can be achieved with self-assembly while maintaining advantages of molecular scale control. In this work, electrokinetic driving forces, i.e., electrohydrodynamic flow, are paired with chemical crosslinking between colloidal particles to form close-packed plasmonic metamolecules. This method addresses challenges of obtaining uniformity in nanostructure geometry and nanometer scale gap spacings in structures. Electrohydrodynamic flows yield robust driving forces between the template and nanoparticles as well as between nanoparticles on the surface promoting the assembly of close-packed metamolecules. Here, electron beam lithography defined Au pillars are used as seed structures that generate electrohydrodynamic flows. Chemical crosslinking between Au surfaces enables molecular control over gap spacings between nanoparticles and Au pillars. An as-fabricated structure is analyzed via full wave electromagnetic simulations and shown to produce large magnetic field enhancements on the order of 3.5 at optical frequencies. This novel method for directed self-assembly demonstrates the synergy between colloidal driving forces and chemical crosslinking for the fabrication of plasmonic metamolecules with unique electromagnetic properties.

Plasmonic nano antennas like dimers, have been investigated for their capability to provide a strong near-field enhancement when illuminated by external light. Traditionally these nano antennas, isolated or arrayed, are placed on a substrate and used in spectroscopy techniques. Surfaces made of such plasmonic nano antennas have been very useful for applications like surface enhanced Raman scattering in which it provides various orders of magnitude of enhanced sensitivity. These instruments however are not economic and are often not mobile since surfaces require an external beam illumination and the Raman scattering is detected by a large aperture microscope. The goal of this paper is to combine nano antennas made of gold dimers with integrated waveguide to make a spectrometer which has low cost and volume in comparison with the structure mentioned above. A technique in which optical plasmonic nano antennas are located in proximity of silicon nitride waveguide is proposed that is useful both for illumination and detection channels. The waveguide evanescent field, which is decaying outside of the waveguide, excites the dimer and causes it to resonate which results in a very strong electric field enhancement of approximately 25 times in the antenna gap. Also the coupling effect of dimer resonance on waveguide modes is investigated. To show the efficiency of the proposed structure, full wave analysis has been done and its results are compared with the multilayer structure case. The simulation results demonstrate that this structure can be designed and fabricated for the purpose of spectroscopy application.