Publications

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.