Plasmon-enhanced photoluminescence from bioconjugated gold nanoparticle and nanodiamond assembly

Abstract

In this letter, we coupled nanodiamonds (NDs) with gold nanoparticles of different sizes using two complementary DNA sequences. After hybridizing the gold nanoparticles on the NDs, we observed the enhancement of the photoluminescence (PL) signals originating from the nitrogen-vacancy (N-V) center of the ND. The enhancement was attributed to the plasmon field created by the gold nanoparticles. The line shape of the enhanced PL spectra was also affected by the sizes of the attached nanoparticles due to their different resonant plasma frequencies. The signal enhancement can be used as an indexing tool for biosensing applications. (C) 2011 American Institute of Physics. [doi:10.1063/1.3576852]