Spectral Tuning of Europium Complex by Competition Between Absorption and Scattering of Gold Nanoparticles

We demonstrate that localized surface plasmon resonance (SPR) supported by gold nanoparticles provides an additional method to control enhancement and quenching dynamics of the radiative transition from rare-earth-ion-doped optical materials. We show that localized plasmon resonance by gold nanoparticles can selectively enhance electric-dipole-like transitions of trivalent europium ion. Through numerical calculations by finite-difference time-domain method, we find that scattering among the interactions for the localized SPR provides enhancement on radiative transitions of trivalent europium ion. We believe these results can be utilized to help extract strong emission from luminescent materials by confined plasmon resonance on nanoscaled structures.