Metal-enhanced chemiluminescence

In this short paper we report the interactions of silver island films with chemiluminescing species. Our findings show that silver island films can increase the detectability of chemiluminescent reactions/species, with an approximately 5-fold increase in signal intensity. This finding not only suggests the use of silver nanostructures to amplify chemiluminscent signatures in assay platforms, and therefore increase the detectability of analytes or biospecies, but more importantly, suggests that surface plasmons can be directly excited by chemically induced electronically excited molecules. This finding is of significance towards our understanding of fluorophore-metal interactions, a relatively new near-field fluorescence concept, recently named metal-enhanced fluorescence and also radiative decay engineering.