Stuart N. Malyn

Metal-enhanced chemiluminescence: Radiating plasmons generated from chemically induced electronic excited states

In this letter, we report the observation of metal-enhanced chemiluminescence. Silver Island films, in close proximity to chemiluminescence species, can significantly enhance luminescence intensities; a 20-fold increase in chemiluminescence intensity was observed as compared to an identical control sample containing no silver. This suggests the use of silver nanostructures in the chemiluminescence-based immunoassays used in the biosciences today, to improve signal and therefore analyte detectability. In addition, this finding suggests that surface plasmons can be directly excited by chemically induced electronically excited luminophores, a significant finding toward our understanding of fluorophore-metal interactions and the generation of surface plasmons.

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.

Microwave-triggered metal-enhanced chemiluminescence (MT-MEC): application to ultra-fast and ultra-sensitive clinical assays.

In this rapid communication we describe a new approach to protein detection with chemiluminescence. By combining common practices in protein detection with chemiluminescence, microwave technology, and metal-enhanced chemiluminescence, we show that we can use low power microwaves to substantially increase enzymatic chemiluminescent reaction rates on metal substrates. As a result, we have found that we can in essence trigger chemiluminescence with low power microwave (Mw) pulses and ultimately, perform on-demand protein detection assays. Using microwave triggered metal-enhanced chemiluminescence (MT-MEC), we not only improve the sensitivity of immunoassays with enhanced signal-to-noise ratios, but we also show that we can accurately quantify protein concentrations by integrating the photon flux for discrete time intervals.