New article: self-assembled plasmonic nanoparticle dimer antennas

Plasmonic antennas have a strong potential to enable monitoring biochemical reactions in nanometer-sized volumes with high sensitivity. However, the difficulty to realize nanometer gap sizes with lithography has restricted the broad use of plasmonic antennas in biochemical applications.

We solve this issue in a recent ACS photonics article where we demonstrate the effectiveness of self-assembled gold nanoparticle antennas with 6nm gap to enhance single molecule fluorescence detection at high concentrations over 10 µM.

This work reports a simple approach towards the realization of efficient dimer gap antennas, that any chemical laboratory can easily reproduce. We also provide the first quantitative measurements of the near-field detection volumes and the fluorescence enhancement factors for a large set of self-assembled nanoantenna designs.