Spectral variation of fluorescence lifetime near single metal nanoparticles

We explore the spectral dependence of fluorescence enhancement and the associated lifetime modification of fluorescent molecules coupled to single metal nanoparticles. Fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy and single-particle dark-field spectroscopy are combined to correlate the dependence of fluorescence lifetime reduction on the spectral overlap between the fluorescence emission and the localised surface plasmon (LSP) spectra of individual gold nanoparticles. A maximum lifetime reduction is observed when the fluorescence and LSP resonances coincide, with good agreement provided by numerical simulations. The explicit comparison between experiment and simulation, that we obtain, offers an insight into the spectral engineering of LSP mediated fluorescence and may lead to optimized application in sensing and biomedicine.