First Observation of Surface Plasmon-Coupled Chemiluminescence (SPCC)

In this letter, we report the first observation of surface plasmon-coupled chemiluminescence (SPCC), where the luminescence from chemically induced electronic excited states couples to surface plasmons in a thin continuous silver film. The SPCC is highly directional and predominantly p-polarized, strongly suggesting that the emission is from surface plasmons instead of the luminophores directly themselves. This indicates that surface plasmons can be directly excited from chemically induced excited states. With a wealth of assays that employ chemiluminescence based detection currently in use, then our findings suggest new chemiluminescence sensing strategies based on localized, directional and polarized chemiluminescence detection.