Fabrication of gold-nanoparticle arrays using photolithography and thermal dewetting

We demonstrate a new manufacturing method using only basic cleanroom techniques to produce an array of 106 100 nm diameter gold-nanoparticles (GNPs) of equal shape and 5 μm spacing on a fused silica surface. Photolithography and sputtering are used to produce gold islets, followed by a simple heating step (thermal dewetting) to reduce the size and transform the shape of the sputtered gold islets. The geometrically precisely controlled array provides an increase in sen-sitivity for a recently introduced plasmonic biosensing method with proven femtomolar sensitivity