%0 Journal Article %J ACS Appl Mater Interfaces %D 2015 %T Light-responsive plasmonic arrays consisting of silver nanocubes and a photoisomerizable matrix. %A Ledin, Petr A %A Russell, Michael %A Geldmeier, Jeffrey A %A Tkachenko, Ihor M %A Mahmoud, Mahmoud A. %A Shevchenko, Valery %A El-Sayed, Mostafa A. %A Tsukruk, Vladimir V. %X 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. %B ACS Appl Mater Interfaces %V 7 %P 4902-12 %8 2015 Mar 4 %G eng %N 8 %1 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25671557?dopt=Abstract %R 10.1021/am508993z