Plasmon-enhanced fluorescence of submonolayer porphyrins by silver-polymer core-shell nanoparticles

We investigate the fluorescence from submonolayer porphyrin molecules near silver-polymer core-shell nanoparticles (NPs) at a well-controlled separation distance of about 1 nm – 5 nm. When porphyrin molecules are deposited on silver NPs with the plasmonic resonance peak at about 410 nm, which matches very closely with the 405-nm excitation laser and the absorption band of porphyrin molecules, their emission intensity is found to be enhanced due to the plasmonic resonant excitation enhancement, and shows a decline as the increasing polymer shell thickness. Meanwhile, the lifetime results demonstrate that there exists the fluorescence quenching due to the charge transfer and nonradiative energy transfer losses, which is also the main reason that the maximum enhancement factor obtained in experiment is only about 2.3, although the theoretical one is above 60 according to the electric field distribution near silver NPs calculated by finite-difference time-domain method.