Fabrication Of Ordered Gold Nanostructures For Surface-enhanced Fluorescence

Surface enhanced fluorescence (SEF) refers to the phenomenon that the signal emission intensity of the fluorescent molecule located adjacent to metal nanostructures with special morphology and configuration is greatly enhanced than the molecule in a free state. As an important detecting technology, fluorescence spectrum plays a significant role in biological science. The SEF intensity can be tuned by simply controlling the distance between the metal nanostructures and fluorescent groups, thus the fabrication of metal nanostructures is becoming into a top priority to optimize the enhancement. Until now various nanostructures have been fabricated to facilitate the SEF. However, such noble metal nanostructures with poor controllability and repeatability, susceptibility to corrosion, tendency to degeneration have greatly hindered practical applications, especially for commercialization. According to these causations, this paper proposes a new preparation method of gold nanoparticle arrays with outstanding SEF effect, which has a composite material of aluminum, gold, silicon dioxide and graphene by employing thermal evaporation, annealing and magnetron sputtering. Such fabrication method could spur huge applications in bioscience.The main innovation points of this paper are as follows:1. Utilizing the alumina template with the advantages of a flat surface, clear structure and high uniformity for industrial mass production, which breaks the limitation of traditional alumina.2. The surface nanostructures were innovatively used to guide the thermal annealing process for controlling the surface morphology.3. Graphene and silicon dioxide were used as coating materials. We found that silicon dioxide coating layer with corrosion and deformation resistance has the effect of regulating the distance between fluorescent groups and gold nanoparticles, which shows great potential in biological detection.