Achiral plasmonic antennas enhance differential absorption to increase preferential detection of chiral single molecules

Plasmonic antennas increase the photon flux in their vicinity, which can lead to plasmon-enhanced fluorescence for molecules near these nanostructures. Here, we combine plasmon-coupled fluorescence and fluorescence-detected circular dichroism to build a specific and sensitive detection strategy for chiral single molecules. Electromagnetic simulations indicate that a two-dimensional gold nanoparticle dimer antenna enhances the electric field and optical chirality of a plane wave in its near field. Furthermore, this optical chirality enhancement can be tuned based on the polarization of the incident electric field, such that enhancing the optical chirality via these antennas will increase the differential absorption of parity-inverted fields. We measured the fluorescence from single molecules of chiral absorbers—Cy5 J-dimers assembled in double-stranded DNA backbones—and achieved increased detectability of these right-handed molecules near achiral Au NP dimer antennas under right circularly polarized illumination. This strategy offers a new approach to distinguishing weakly fluorescent enantiomers.