Sensitive surface plasmon resonance enabled by templated periodic arrays of gold nanodonuts

Here we report a simple and scalable colloidal lithography technology for fabricating periodic arrays of gold nanodonuts for sensitive surface plasmon resonance (SPR) analysis. This new bottom-up approach leverages a unique polymer wetting layer between a self-assembled, non-close-packed monolayer silica colloidal crystal and a silicon substrate to template ordered gold nanodonuts with tunable geometries over wafer-sized areas. The processes involved in this templating nanofabrication approach, including spin coating, oxygen plasma etching, and metal sputtering, are all compatible with standard microfabrication technologies. Specular reflection measurements reveal that the efficient electromagnetic coupling of the incident light with the tunable SPR modes of the templated gold nanodonut arrays enables good spectral tunability. Bulk refractive index sensing experiments show that a high SPR sensitivity of ∼758 nm per refractive index unit, which outperforms many plasmonic nanostructures fabricated by both top-down and bottom-up approaches, can be achieved using the templated gold nanodonut arrays. Numerical finite-difference time-domain simulations have also been performed to complement the optical characterization and the theoretical results match well with the experimental measurements.