Porous glasses with silver nanoparticles as the sensitive material for sensors to measure the index of refraction of analytes

摘要

We synthesize silver nanoparticles in porous glass having a mean pore size of 17 nm. We show that when the free pore space that accompanies these particles is filled with an analyte, the peak in the silver-particle plasmon resonance band shifts as a function of the analyte index of refraction, and its amplitude increases. Numerical modeling confirms these experimental results. We show that the plasmon band amplitude increases by a factor of 2 as the index of refraction of the medium increases from 1 to 1.47; the sensitivity of the spectral location of the band to a change in the index of refraction of the medium is 80 nm per index-of-refraction unit. (C) 2017 Optical Society of America.