Place a fluorescing molecule next to a gold nanosphere and it lights up like a supernova.

That’s what Vahid “Thou” Sandoghdar and his cronies at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich are telling ya’ll today. This simple trick turns a molecular matchflame into a full blown roman candle.

Here’s what’s goin on. The light emitted from the molecule causes waves of electrons called plasmons to surf over the surface of the sphere. If the frequency is just right, yer get a resonant effect that boosts the emission. Thou Sand reckons he can boost the fluorescence by a factor of ten thousand.

Strap your gold nanosphere to the end of a probe, scan it across a surface and as the sphere passes by, individual molecules will flare up like herpes on a party campus (ah mention no names, Arizona State, cough) . Molecules have a habit of a-movin and a-migratin when you ain’t looking so having a way to spot them again is surely gonna be handy for anybody building molecular machines and computers.

Ref:  arxiv.org/abs/0710.4092: Modification of Single Molecule Fluorescence close to a Nanostructure: Radiation Pattern, Spontaneous Emission and Quenching

This entry was posted on Friday, November 2nd, 2007 at 5:41 am and is filed under Seein' the light. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.