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

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 tec...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inNanophotonics (Berlin, Germany) Vol. 7; no. 3; pp. 643 - 649
Main Authors Kaminska, Izabela, Vietz, Carolin, Cuartero-González, Álvaro, Tinnefeld, Philip, Fernández-Domínguez, Antonio I., Acuna, Guillermo P.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Berlin De Gruyter 23.02.2018
Walter de Gruyter GmbH
Subjects
Chemical compounds
Computer simulation
Deoxyribonucleic acid
DNA
DNA origami
Fluorescence
Nanoparticles
Oxidation
photon count enhancement
Photons
plasmonics
reduction of photobleaching
silver nanoparticle
single-molecule detection
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Summary: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 30× 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.
ISSN:2192-8614
2192-8606
2192-8614
DOI:10.1515/nanoph-2017-0081