Gold nanorods: a fantastic nanomaterial for a diversity of applications

Gold Nanorods (GNR) are certainly one of the most versatile plasmonic nanoparticles, whose design, nanofabrication, characterization and applications have been in the forefront of nanophotonics and nanoplasmonic research. In this talk, I shall briefly review mainly some recent results on random laser applications exploiting the influence of the fifth order nonlinear response of the GNR, the characterization of the nonlinear refractive index response of GNR under electric field alignment, with implications for dynamic display and a more recent development using genetic algorithms (GAs) to provide a high-quality optimization results within feasible computational times, applied to determine the optimal geometric parameters for enhancing the absorptive optical properties of gold nanorods.