Surface plasmon resonance absorption

Figure 20.2 Size and shape dependence of the surface plasmon resonance absorption spectra of gold nanoparticles. (A) Spheres in different sizes (B) Rods in different aspect ratios.

Other spectroscopic techniques that have been used with electrochemistry to probe nanoparticles include electronic and vibrational spectroscopies. The spec-troelectrochemistry of nanosized silver particles based on their interaction with planar electrodes has been studied recently [146] using optically transparent thin layer electrodes (OTTLE). Colloidal silver shows a surface plasmon resonance absorption at 400 nm corresponding to 0.15 V vs. Ag/AgCl. This value blue shifts to 392 nm when an Au mesh electrode in the presence of Ag colloid is polarized to —0.6 V (figure 20.12). The absorption spectrum is reported to be quite reproducible and reversible. This indicates that the electron transfer occurs between the colloidal particles and a macroelectrode and vice versa. The kinetics of electron transfer is followed by monitoring the absorbance as a function of time. The use of an OTTLE cell ensures that the absorbance is due to all the particles in the cell between the cell walls and the electrode. The distance over which the silver particles will diffuse has been calculated to be 80 pm in 150 s, using a diffusion coef-... 

Excitation Through Surface-Plasmon Resonance Absorption... 

El-Sayed, I.H., Huang, X. and El-Sayed, M.A. (2005) Surface plasmon resonance scattering and absorption of anti-EGFR antibody conjugated gold nanopartides in cancer diagnostics Applications in oral cancer. Nano Letters, 5, 829-834. 

In these sensors, the intrinsic absorption of the analyte is measured directly. No indicator chemistry is involved. Thus, it is more a kind of remote spectroscopy, except that the instrument comes to the sample (rather than the sample to the instrument or cuvette). Numerous geometries have been designed for plain fiber chemical sensors, all kinds of spectroscopies (from IR to mid-IR and visible to the UV from Raman to light scatter, and from fluorescence and phosphorescence intensity to the respective decay times) have been exploited, and more sophisticated methods including evanescent wave spectroscopy and surface plasmon resonance have been applied. 

The presence of metallic surfaces or particles in the vicinity of a fluorophore can dramatically alter the fluorescence emission and absorption properties of the fluorophore. The effect, which is associated with the surface plasmon resonance of the metallic surface, depends on parameters such as metal type, particle size, fluorophore type and fluorophore-particle separation. 

Although chemisorption is not essential, when it does occur there may be further enhancement of the Raman signal, since the formation of new chemical bonds and the consequent perturbation of adsorbate electronic energy levels can lead to a surface-induced RR effect. The combination of surface and resonance enhancement (SERRS) can occur when adsorbates have intense electronic absorption bands in the same spectral region as the metal surface plasmon resonance, yielding an overall enhancement as large as 10lo-1012. 

In principle, optical chemosensors make use of optical techniques to provide analytical information. The most extensively exploited techniques in this regard are optical absorption and photoluminescence. Moreover, sensors based on surface plasmon resonance (SPR) and surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) have recently been devised. 

Similar to zero-dimensional metal nanoparticles, most of the work on one-dimensional metal nanostructures focuses almost exclusively on gold nanorods. The high interest in anisometric gold nanoclusters arises from their unique optical and electronic properties that can be easily tuned through small changes in size, structure (e.g., the position, width, and intensity of the absorption band due to the longitudinal surface plasmon resonance is strongly influenced by the shell as well as the aspect ratio of the nanorods), shape (e.g., needle, round capped cylinder, or dog bone), and the inter-particle distance [157]. 

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