title: Gold Nanohole Array with Sub-1 nm Roughness by Annealing for Sensitivity Enhancement of Extraordinary Optical Transmission Biosensor.
abstract: Nanofabrication technology plays an important role in the performance of surface plasmonic devices such as extraordinary optical transmission (EOT) sensor. In this work, a double liftoff process was developed to fabricate a series of nanohole arrays of a hole diameter between 150 and 235 nm and a period of 500 nm in a 100-nm-thick gold film on a silica substrate. To improve the surface quality of the gold film, thermal annealing was conducted, by which an ultra-smooth gold film with root-mean-square (RMS) roughness of sub-1 nm was achieved, accompanied with a hole diameter shrinkage. The surface sensitivity of the nanohole arrays was measured using a monolayer of 16-mercaptohexadecanoic acid (16-MHA) molecule, and the surface sensitivity was increased by 2.5 to 3 times upon annealing the extraordinary optical transmission (EOT) sensor.
authors.affiliation: Waterloo Institute for Nanotechnology (WIN), University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, N2L 3G1, Canada, j242zhan@uwaterloo.ca.
authors.forename: Jian
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.forename: Mehrdad
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Irannejad
authors.forename: Mustafa
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Yavuz
authors.forename: Bo
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Cui