Bioenabled Nanophotonics
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Plasmon-Resonant Metal Nanoparticles
Nanophotonics
Yeechi Chen,* Keiko Munechika,* and David S. Ginger Abstract Biological molecules such as oligonucleotides, proteins, or peptides can be used for the synthesis, recognition, and assembly of materials with nanoscale dimensions. Of particular interest are the fields of near-field optics and plasmonics. Many potential optical applications depend on the ability to control the relative positioning of organic dyes, plasmon-resonant metal nanoparticles, and semiconductor quantum dots with nanoscale precision. In this article, we describe some recent achievements in biological assembly and nanophotonics, and discuss potential uses of biological materials for assembling optically functional nanostructures. We emphasize the use of biological materials to build well-defined nanostructures for near-field plasmon-enhanced fluorescence.
Introduction Biological materials assembly is gaining popularity in the field of materials science. Methods using biological systems offer researchers a number of potentially attractive features: the ability to catalyze the growth of inorganic materials under mild conditions,1,2 the means to control the microstructure and nanostructure of the assembled materials,3 the ability to recognize molecules and surfaces with good sensitivity and selectivity,4–6 and the flexibility to build nearly arbitrary supramolecular architectures with nanometer precision.7 All of this is accomplished with the flexible chemistry of biomolecules such as DNA, peptides, and proteins, and relies heavily on leveraging the tools of modern biochemistry. Historically, much effort has been devoted to characterizing the micro- and nanoscale structure of biologically grown materials in comparison to their bulk inorganic counterparts, largely because of the remarkable difference in materials properties. For example, the interlinking proteins in abalone nacre make the composite material 3,000 times more fracture-resistant than the inorganic component alone.8 More recently, there has been a virtual explosion of research investigating potential uses of biological materials in nanoelectronics9–11
and nanophotonics.12–14 As shown in Figure 1, many structural motifs in biology seem size-matched to interesting physical and materials length scales. Simultaneously, an increasing number of labeling and sensing applications in biology are exploiting the unique optical, electrical, and chemical properties of nanostructures.14–24 Rather than trying to cover all possible permutations of “bionano” research in a short overview, this article focuses on the intersection of the fields of near-field optics and plasmonics with biological materials assembly. Broadly, near-field optics concerns the behavior of light at sub-wavelength distances, while plasmonics seeks to harness collective oscillations of free electrons in metals for a variety of applications. Illuminating metal nanoparticles can excite plasmons, which in turn, produce areas of confined, intense electric fields near the nanoparticle
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