TY - JOUR T1 - Light-responsive plasmonic arrays consisting of silver nanocubes and a photoisomerizable matrix. JF - ACS Appl Mater Interfaces Y1 - 2015 A1 - Ledin, Petr A A1 - Russell, Michael A1 - Geldmeier, Jeffrey A A1 - Tkachenko, Ihor M A1 - Mahmoud, Mahmoud A. A1 - Shevchenko, Valery A1 - El-Sayed, Mostafa A. A1 - Tsukruk, Vladimir V. AB - We report on the synthesis of novel branched organic-inorganic azo-polyhedral oligomeric silsesquioxane (POSS) conjugates (Azo-POSS) and their use as a stable active medium to induce reversible plasmonic modulations of embedded metal nanostructures. A dense monolayer of silver nanocubes was deposited on a quartz substrate using the Langmuir-Blodgett technique and subsequently coated with an ultrathin Azo-POSS layer. The reversible light-induced photoisomerization between the trans and cis states of the azobenzene-terminated branched POSS material results in significant changes in the refractive index (up to 0.17) at a wavelength of 380 nm. We observed that the pronounced and reversible change in the surrounding refractive index results in a corresponding hypsochromic plasmonic shift of 6 nm in the plasmonic band of the embedded silver nanocubes. The reversible tuning of the plasmonic modes of noble-metal nanostructures using a variable-refractive-index medium opens up the possibility of fabricating photoactive, hybrid, ultrathin coatings with robust, real-time, photoinitiated responses for prospective applications in photoactive materials that can be reversibly tuned by light illumination. VL - 7 CP - 8 U1 - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25671557?dopt=Abstract M3 - 10.1021/am508993z ER -