Temperature-Dependent Plasmonic Responses from Gold Nanoparticle Dimers Linked by Double-Stranded DNA

DNA is a powerful tool to assemble gold nanoparticles into discrete structures with tunable plasmonic properties for photonic or biomedical applications. Because of their photothermal properties or their use in biological media, these nanostructures can experience drastic modifications of the local temperature that can affect their morphology and, therefore, their optical responses. Using single-nanostructure spectroscopy, we demonstrate that, even with a fully stable DNA linker, gold particle dimers can undergo substantial conformational changes at temperatures larger than 50 °C and aggregate irreversibly. Such temperature-dependent resonant optical properties could find applications in imaging and in the design of nonlinear photothermal sources. Inversely, to provide fully stable DNA-templated plasmonic nanostructures at biologically relevant temperatures, we show how passivating the gold nanoparticles using amphiphilic surface chemistries renders the longitudinal plasmon resonance of gold particle dimers nearly independent of the local temperature.