Plasmonic Nanoarchitectures for Single‐Molecule Explorations: An Overview

Abstract

Plasmonic nanostructures have immense potentials for extreme concentration of light into deep‐subwavelength spaces with giant local field intensity, which can be exploited for novel applications including nanoscale optical trapping, biosensing, and enhanced spectroscopy. Herein, a succinct overview of the potentials of engineered plasmonic nanoarchitectures of various geometries including nanoparticles, nanodimers, nanoapertures, nanoporous surfaces, and picometer‐scale gap systems for single‐molecule analysis is provided. In particular, the potentials of single plasmonic nanoparticles for single‐molecule sensing, coupled plasmonic nanodimers for few‐molecule strong coupling, metallic nanocavities for optical manipulation of single molecules, nanoporous metasurfaces for enhanced single‐molecule spectroscopy, and plasmonic picocavities for single‐molecule optomechanics are extensively discussed. Finally, as an outlook, exploiting such novel nanoarchitectures for developing innovative biosensing platforms that will be able to trap and detect objects at the single‐molecule level is forwarded.

Keywords

• plasmonic nanoarchitectures
• single-molecule detection
• single-molecule manipulation
• single-molecule optomechanics
• single-molecule spectroscopy
• single-molecule strong coupling