Polymer nanofibers embedded with aligned gold nanorods: a new platform for plasmonic studies and optical sensing.

This paper reports the fabrication and characterization of polymer nanofibers embedded with gold nanorods in uniaxial alignment for applications in optical waveguiding and sensing. Using a waveguiding approach, we demonstrated highly efficient excitation of localized surface plasmon resonance in the embedded gold nanorods with a photon-to-plasmon-conversion efficiency as high as 70% for a single nanorod at its longitudinal resonance wavelength. On the basis of waveguiding polymer nanofibers embedded with gold nanorods, we further demonstrated compact optical humidity sensors with a response time of 110 ms and an operation optical power as low as 500 pW.