Plasmon-enhanced fluorescence imaging with silicon-based silver chips for protein and nucleic acid assay.

Metal-enhanced fluorescence shows great potential for improving the sensitivity of fluoroscopy, which has been widely used in protein and nucleic acid detection for biosensor and bioassay applications. In comparison with the traditional glass-supported metal nanoparticles (MNPs), the introduction of a silicon substrate has been shown to provide an increased surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) effect due to the coupling between the MNPs and the semiconducting silicon substrate. In this work, we further study the fluorescence-enhanced effect of the silicon-supported silver-island (Ag@Si) plasmonic chips.