Morphology dependent surface enhanced fluorescence study on silver nanorod arrays fabricated by glancing angle deposition

Abstract

The nanorods morphology dependence of surface-enhanced fluorescence (SEF) has been investigated for Rhodamine 6G adsorbed onto silver nanorod arrays. SEF activity of the nanorod arrays was observed to increase significantly for uniform and identical shape nanorods grown at a reduced substrate temperature (140 K). On increasing the nanorod length, a significant rise in SEF enhancement factor up to 32 was observed with respect to the conventional silver film. The observation shows the potential of silver nanorod arrays as high-sensitivity substrates for SEF based studies. The variation of SEF efficiency can be qualitatively explained using lightning-rod and surface plasmon resonance effects.