DNA origami assembled nanoantennas for manipulating single-molecule spectral emission

Abstract

Optical nanoantennas can affect the decay rates of nearby emitters by modifying the local density of photonic states around them. In the weak-coupling limit, and according to the Fermi's Golden Rule, the emission spectrum of a dye is given by the energy of all the possible radiative transitions weighted by the probability of each of them to occur. By engineering the resonance of a nanoantenna, one can selectively enhance specific vibronic transitions of a dye molecule, thus shaping its emission spectrum. Since interactions between emitters and nanoantennas are known to be position dependent, we make here use of DNA origami to precisely place an individual dye at different positions around a gold nanorod. We show how this relative position between the nanorod and the emitter affects the emission spectrum of the latter. In particular, we observe the appearance of a second fluorescence peak whose wavelength and intensity are correlated with the fundamental plasmonic resonance of the nanorod, which we extract from its photoluminescence spectrum. This second peak results from the selective enhancement of transitions to different vibrational levels of the excitonic ground state, whose energies are in resonance with the plasmonic one. Furthermore, we argue that the drastic alteration of the fluorescence spectrum in some of our samples cannot be accounted for with Kasha's rule, which indicates that radiative and vibrational relaxation dye lifetimes can become comparable through the coupling to the gold nanorods.