Templated Nanodimple Arrays with Tunable Nanostructures for Sensitive Surface Plasmon Resonance Analysis

Abstract

This paper reports a simple and scalable colloidal templating technology for fabricating wafer-scale periodic plasmonic nanodimple arrays with tunable nanostructures. A double-layer, non-close-packed colloidal crystal–polymer nanocomposite created by a spin-coating technique is used as structural template in a simple oxygen plasma etching process to fabricate periodic arrays of nanodimples. The resulting plasmonic arrays can sense a small dielectric refractive index change of ∼0.008, and they exhibit high SPR sensitivity of up to ∼520 nm per refractive index unit. The experimental plasmonic performance of the nanodimple arrays matches with the numerical simulations using a finite-difference time-domain model.