High-fidelity optofluidic on-chip sensors using well-defined gold nanowell crystals

Recent advances in nanofabrication techniques have enabled the creation of various metallic nanostructures in order to engineer the location and properties of electromagnetic hot spots in a controlled manner. However, most previous methods usually require complicated and time-consuming techniques, and the integration of metallic nanostructures into simple, low-cost devices for chemical or biological sensing is still challenging. Here, we report a promising new strategy for the fabrication of large-area gold nanowell arrays with novel geometric features that makes use of the trapping of self-assembled colloidal particles on a polymer surface. Through both systematic experimental and theoretical analysis, we confirm that the strong plasmon resonances of the proposed nanowell structures are associated with localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) on the brims of the nanoholes in the top gold films as well as in the bottom gold disks. In addition, we demonstrate a novel optofluidic platform with built-in subwavelength nanowell arrays that exhibits strong plasmon resonances within microfluidic chips. In our optofluidic systems, the plasmon coupling between the brims and the disks of nanowells makes the plasmon resonance more sensitive to surrounding materials. The dependence of the plasmon resonance on the refractive index of the surrounding medium is found to be as high as 570 nm RIU(-1) (refractive index units). These data lead to a figure of merit (FOM), the slope of refractive index sensitivity in eV RIU(-1)/line width (eV), as high as 4.1.