From nano-plasmonic optics toward molecules bio-sensing

A systematic study on optical properties of nano-metallic particles was investigated. Nano metallic particle plasmon resonant peak wavelengths are significantly red-shifted from that of a single particle because of near-field coupling when two nano-particles are placed closer to each other. The shift decays approximately exponentially with increasing particle spacing and become negligible when the gap between the two particles exceeds about 2.5 times the particle short-axis length. While resonant peak of a finite 1D nano-particles chain is also significantly red-shifted, the peak wavelength is found to be non-monotonic and oscillating with the variation of the chain length. The results shown to occurs only for larger particles where phase retardation effects are important in plasmon coupling.; Based on the coupling results from nano-particle interaction studies, we develop a new type of tunable plasmon resonance nano-particles, named tunable nano-plasmonic resonator (TNPR) which consists multi-layered Au/SiO2 nanodisks. Compared to single layered Au nanodisks, multilayered nanodisks TNPR exhibit several distinctive properties including significantly enhanced plasmon resonances and tunable resonance wavelengths which can be tailored to desired values by simply varying dielectric layer thickness while the particle diameter is kept constant. This tunable and augmented plasmon resonance holds a great potential in the applications of surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS). Characterized TNPR enhancement factor reaches as high as 4.7 x 10 10 for individual TNPRs, among the highest enhancement factor reported in single nanoparticle, indicating that our designed TNPR can serve as a great SERS active-substrate by matching the laser pumping frequency to maximize SERS enhancement. TNPR design was implemented for real bio-application. The sensitivity of non-optimized TNPR for in vitro proteolytic PSA assays reaches to 6pM. Compared to other cancer biomarker detection assays, our TNPR design allows the detection of pico-molar concentrations in pico-liter volume which is crucial especially for cancer screening at a single cancer cell level. The nano-fabrication of TNPR eliminates the issues such as large size variations, cluster aggregation, and interparticle effects in conventional SERS substrate. TNPR produces very controllable and repeatable SERS signals at the desired locations and thus, makes it an ideal candidate for device integration such as lab-on-a-chip.