Sensitivity and Optimization of Localized Surface Plasmon Resonance Transducers

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Why is it important?

In this work we explored systematically for the first time the decay length of the plasmon, or the size of the sensing volume, around gold nanoparticles (NP) of various sizes, and explored its connection with the commonly used "refractive index sensitivity" (RIS) measure. We found that the decay length and RIS are correlated, and that instead of choosing the highest RIS, sometimes an NP with low RIS is better, for small analytes, thanks to a small sensing volume.