Excitation–Emission Synchronization-Mediated Directional Fluorescence: Insight into Plasmon-Coupled Emission at Vibrational Resolution

Abstract

Light-matter interactions have always been a fundamentally significant topic that has attracted much attention. It is important to reveal a fluorophore-plasmon interaction on the nanoscale. However, as a powerful investigative tool, fluorescence spectroscopy still suffers from a limited spectral resolution and the susceptibility to interfering substances. In this work, excitation-emission synchronization-mediated surface-plasmon-coupled emission (EES-SPCE) is proposed to break the bottleneck. By actively screening the energy transitions for observation, an improved spectral resolution has been achieved, which is advantageous to the investigation of the fluorophore-plasmon interactions under different coupling modes. The spectral information related to the plasmonic interactions through tuning vibrational energy levels is clearly distinguished at directional emission angles. EES-SPCE is demonstrated to selectively and efficiently extract the coupled emission from the vibrational resolution, which would open up the opportunity to improve the capability of spectral feature identification and signal collection for practical applications of plasmonic fluorescence spectroscopy.