Single-Molecule Surface Plasmon-Coupled Emission with Plasmonic Gratings

The ability to image single molecules (SM) has been the dream of scientists for centuries, and because of the substantial recent advances in microscopy, individual fluorescent molecules can now be observed on a regular basis. However, the development of such imaging systems was not without dilemmas, such as the detection and separation of individual fluorescence emissions. One method to solve this problem utilized surface plasmon resonance (SPR) to enhance the emission intensity of SMs. Although enhancing the SM emission intensity has yielded promising results, this method does not fully utilize the unique plasmonic properties that could vastly improve the SM imaging capabilities. Here, we use SPR excitation as well as surface plasmon-coupled emission from a high-definition digital versatile disc grating structure to image and identify different fluorophores using the angular emission of individual molecules. Our results have important implications for research in multiplexed SM spectroscopy and SM fluorescence imaging.