Shifting molecular localization by plasmonic coupling in a single-molecule mirage.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 28074833.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/ncomms13966 and PMC identifier 5512867.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Over the last decade, two fields have dominated the attention of sub-diffraction photonics research: plasmonics and fluorescence nanoscopy. Nanoscopy based on single-molecule localization offers a practical way to explore plasmonic interactions with nanometre resolution. However, this seemingly straightforward technique may retrieve false positional information. Here, we make use of the DNA origami technique to both control a nanometric separation between emitters and a gold nanoparticle, and as a platform for super-resolution imaging based on single-molecule localization. This enables a quantitative comparison between the position retrieved from single-molecule localization, the true position of the emitter and full-field simulations. We demonstrate that plasmonic coupling leads to shifted molecular localizations of up to 30 nm: a single-molecule mirage.