Design and fabrication of gold nanostructures with nanosphere lithography for LSPR applications

Abstract

This paper reports the details regarding the design and fabrication of gold nanostructures on glass substrates through nanosphere lithography (NSL) for the application of localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR), which can be used for biosensors. It is realized through gold film deposition on nanospheres dispersed on a surface and subsequent anisotropic etching. Depending on the gold deposition and etching conditions, a variety of gold nanostructure shapes can be obtained. So far through this method, only 2D nanocrescents are reported. In this paper it is pointed out that both 2D and 3D non-conformal nanostructures can be fabricated, and some 2D and 3D profiles of the obtainable nanostructures are simulated by our programs under various deposition and etching conditions. The fabrication processes of the nanostructures on glass substrates are also reported, and the simulated profiles of such nanostructures coincide well with the experimental results. These results prove that our profile simulation program can realize the design of 2D and 3D nanostructures obtainable by nanosphere lithography, and reduce the effort and cost for achieving optimized nanostructures by experiments in the trial and error stage.