Colloidal Silver Nanoplates: State of the Art and Future Challenges*

This chapter intends to describe the optical properties of silver nanoplates, as well as the various synthetic methods, physical and wet-chemical, that have been developed, with a closer look at those based on colloid chemistry. It provides a description of the crystallographic structure and the morphology of these systems. The chapter describes a few existing studies on morphological changes that can be induced on these systems, which are considered for practical application. It gives a thorough description of the optical response of silver nanoplates. The chapter also provides an intuitive picture of the origin of the intrinsic optical properties for noble metal nanoparticles, and also describes the basis of the numerical methods that have been used for the theoretical modelling of such properties, namely the discrete dipole approximation (DDA) and the boundary element method (BEM). The chapter reviews the various reported studies on silver nanoprisms using both DDA and BEM, as well as their comparison with experimental data.