Bimetallic nanopetals for thousand-fold fluorescence enhancements

We present a simple, ultra-rapid and robust method to create sharp nanostructures-nanopetals-in a shape memory polymer substrate demonstrating unprecedented enhancements for surface enhanced sensing over large surface areas. These bimetallic nanostructures demonstrate extremely strong surface plasmon resonance effects due to the high density multifaceted petal structures that increase the probability of forming nanogaps. We demonstrate that our nanopetals exhibit extremely strong surface plasmons, confining the emission and enhancing the fluorescence intensity of the nearby high-quantum yield fluorescein by >4000X. The enhancements are confined to the extremely small volumes at the nanopetal borders. This enables us to achieve single molecule detection at relatively high and physiological concentrations. (C) 2010 American Institute of Physics. [doi:10.1063/1.3495773]