Stark Effect Control of the Scattering Properties of Plasmonic Nanogaps Containing an Organic Semiconductor

[Image: see text] The development of actively tunable plasmonic nanostructures enables real-time reconfigurable and on-demand enhancement of optical signals. This is an essential requirement for a wide range of applications such as sensing and nanophotonic devices, for which electrically driven tunability is required. By modifying the transition energies of a material via the application of an electric field, the Stark effect offers a reliable and practical approach to achieve such tunability. In this work, we report on the use of the Stark effect to control the scattering response of a plasmonic nanogap formed between a silver nanoparticle and an extended silver film separated by a thin layer of the organic semiconductor PQT-12. The plasmonic response of such nanoscattering sources follows the quadratic Stark shift. In addition, our approach allows one to experimentally determine the polarizability of the semiconductor material embedded in the nanogap region, offering a new approach to probe the excitonic properties of extremely thin semiconducting materials such as 2D materials under applied external electric field with nanoscale resolution.