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Strong Fluorescence Enhancement with Silica-Coated Au Nanoshell Dimers

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Abstract

Fluorescence intensity is vital for fluorescence sensing and imaging because it determines the sensing sensitivity and imaging brightness. This study reports plasmon-enhanced fluorescence by engineering plasmonic nanostructures, that are SiO2-coated Au nanoshell dimers with a high yield exceeding 60 %. With this elaborately designed nanostructure, we show that the thin SiO2 shell can conveniently distance the fluorophore from the underneath metal, thereby effectively avoiding fluorescence quenching. Meanwhile, the inner Au nanoshell dimers create abundant hot spots at particle-particle junctions and enable near-infrared fluorescence enhancement. The largest fluorescence enhancement achieved is 69 times for the design with a 9 nm external SiO2 shell, as is also confirmed by three-dimensional finite-difference time-domain simulations. This dramatically increased fluorescence has great significance in fluorescence-based sensing and imaging.

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Acknowledgments

The authors thank the financial supports from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 91027037 and 21173171) and Prof. Yan He for his kind assistance for obtaining the dark-field images in his lab.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Chem/Biosensing and Chemometrics, College of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Hunan University, Changsha, 410082, People’s Republic of China

    Yunran Zhai, Lin Yuan, Jiawen Hu & Xiangfeng Duan

  2. Department of Physics, Xiamen University, Xiamen, 361005, China

    Lingyan Meng & Zhilin Yang

  3. Changsha Animal Disease Control Center, Changsha, 410082, China

    Lijun Xu

  4. Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, USA

    Xiangfeng Duan

Authors
  1. Yunran Zhai
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  2. Lingyan Meng
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  3. Lijun Xu
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  4. Lin Yuan
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  5. Zhilin Yang
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  6. Jiawen Hu
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  7. Xiangfeng Duan
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Zhilin Yang, Jiawen Hu or Xiangfeng Duan.

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Zhai, Y., Meng, L., Xu, L. et al. Strong Fluorescence Enhancement with Silica-Coated Au Nanoshell Dimers. Plasmonics 12, 263–269 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11468-016-0259-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11468-016-0259-5

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