Strong plasmonic enhancement of single molecule photostability in silver dimer optical antennas

Kaminska, Izabela; Vietz, Carolin; Cuartero-Gonzalez, Alvaro; Tinnefeld, Philip; Fernandez-Dominguez, Antonio I. and Acuna, Guillermo P. (2018): Strong plasmonic enhancement of single molecule photostability in silver dimer optical antennas. In: Nanophotonics, Vol. 7, No. 3: pp. 643-649

Abstract

Photobleaching is an effect terminating the photon output of fluorophores, limiting the duration of fluorescence-based experiments. Plasmonic nanoparticles (NPs) can increase the overall fluorophore photostability through an enhancement of the radiative rate. In this work, we use the DNA origami technique to arrange a single fluorophore in the 12-nm gap of a silver NP dimer and study the number of emitted photons at the single molecule level. Our findings yielded a 30x enhancement in the average number of photons emitted before photobleaching. Numerical simulations are employed to rationalize our results. They reveal the effect of silver oxidation on decreasing the radiative rate enhancement.

• Item Type: Journal article
• Faculties: Chemistry and Pharmacy > Department of Chemistry
• Subjects: 500 Science > 540 Chemistry
• ISSN: 2192-8606
• Language: English