Experimental observation of giant chiroptical amplification of small chiral molecules by gold nanosphere clusters

Rong Yao Wang*, Peng Wang, Yineng Liu, Wenjing Zhao, Dawei Zhai, Xuhai Hong, Yinglu Ji, Xiaochun Wu, Feng Wang, Duan Zhang, Wensheng Zhang, Ruibin Liu, Xiangdong Zhang

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

77 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

We have experimentally observed around 2 orders of magnitude circular dichroism (CD) enhancement in the visible region for cysteine molecules located in the hotspots of gold nanosphere clusters. The observed plasmon-induced CD responses show a significant correlation with the chiral nature of molecules at the hotspots. These results provide a concrete experimental demonstration on the predicted chiroptical transfer and amplification effect that arises from hotspot-mediated exciton-plasmon interactions in a strongly coupled metallic nanostructure, even though the exciton-plasmon coupling works at a far off-resonant regime. Our findings suggest here that plasmonic hotspot-based CD amplifier may provide a new strategy for ultrasensitive detection and quantification of molecular chirality-a key aspect for various bioscience and biomedicine applications.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)9690-9695
Number of pages6
JournalJournal of Physical Chemistry C
Volume118
Issue number18
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 8 May 2014

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