Experimental Observation of Giant Chiroptical Amplification of Small Chiral Molecules by Gold Nanosphere Clusters

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.