Plasmonic Sensing Characteristics of Silver Nanoplate Films Fabricated by Electrostatic Self-assembly

In this paper, we reported an electrostatic self-assembly method for the fabrication of silver nanoplate films as sensitive plasmonic substrates. In this method, silver nanoplate solutions with adjustable sizes and different concentrations were prepared by a seed-mediated growth approach, and then, the deposited substrates were modified with amino groups using a surface modification strategy. Then, a series of silver nanoplate films for surface plasmon sensing were uniformly prepared by Coulomb attraction between the modified substrates and the silver nanoplates. The research results show that this method can effectively promote the formation of nanoplate monolayer films that uniformly adhere to glass substrates at macro- and microscales, and these films show good refractive index sensing characteristics with a maximum refractive index sensitivity of 357.6 nm/RIU. The experimental results also show that the silver nanoplate films reported in this paper can be used as the key material for refractive index sensing for the detection and analysis of environmental substances.

Automated summary

In this paper, an electrostatic self-assembly method was used to fabricate sensitive plasmonic substrates in the form of silver nanoplate films. Silver nanoplate solutions with adjustable sizes and different concentrations were prepared using a seed-mediated growth approach, and the deposited substrates were modified with amino groups. The Coulomb attraction between the modified substrates and the silver nanoplates enabled the uniform preparation of silver nanoplate films for surface plasmon sensing. The research results demonstrate that these films exhibit good refractive index sensing characteristics and can be used for detecting and analyzing environmental substances.