Water Adsorption by a Sensitive Calibrated Gold Plasmonic Nanosensor

Langmuir. 2018 May 15;34(19):5381-5385. doi: 10.1021/acs.langmuir.8b00040. Epub 2018 May 4.

Abstract

We demonstrate in this work that using nanoplasmonic sensing it is possible to follow the adsorption/desorption of water molecules on gold nanodisks nanofabricated by electron beam lithography. This quantitative method is highly sensitive allowing the detection of a few hundredths of adsorbed monolayer. Disk parameters (height, diameter, and interdisk distance) have been optimized after finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) simulations in order to obtain the best localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) signal-to-noise ratio. Finally, we have precisely measured the adsorption kinetics of water on gold as a function of the relative humidity of the surrounding medium.