2408
Engineering Plasmonic Lattice Structures for Lab-on-Chip Sensing Platforms

Tuesday, 15 May 2018: 10:40
Room 303 (Washington State Convention Center)
K. Smith, C. Norville, and J. Dawson (West Virginia University)
The study of plasmonics has increased in the past decades due to the benefits they offer to a wide range of application areas including optics, point-of-care sensing, spectroscopy, imaging, etc. The fabrication of plasmonic devices has relied on sub-micron to nanoscale fabrication techniques that are typically low throughput, and often result in transducers that are challenging to integrate with other lab-on-chip components. Methods based on a combination of bottom-up self-assembly and top-down nanosphere lithography based provided solutions to these fabrication challenges. This paper will discuss the design and fabrication of nanosphere-based plasmonic lattices that directly utilize nanosphere deposition to create resonant plasmonic transducers capable of resonant enhancement of quantum dot and fluorescent labels with visible-spectrum emission. Parametric simulations of critical plasmonic lattice dimensions using finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) software will be presented to offer insight into design optimization for maximum emission enhancement for a given range of commercially-available nanobeads. Fabrication of the sub-micron lattice using nanobeads sized in the 100-500 nm range in an evaporative deposition process will be described, along with an evaluation of variations in ‘as-drawn’ and fabricated lattice dimensions. Characterization results indicating 10-fold+ enhancement of photonic emission from labeled analyte in suspension will be provided.