Our Glowing Microfluidics paper ACCEPTED in Light Sciences and Applicaitons

Our paper entitled 'Tuning chemiluminescence of a luminol flow by plasmonic nanoparticles' has been accepted for publication at Light Science and Applications.

We discover strong increase of the intensity of chemiluminescence of a luminol flow and a dramatic modification of its spectral shape in the presence of metallic nanoparticles. We observed that pumping gold and silver nanoparticles into a microfluidic device fabricated in polydimethylsiloxane prolongs the glow time of luminol. We demonstrate that the intensity of chemiluminescence in the presence of nanospheres is dependent on the position along the microfluidic serpentine channel. We show that the enhancement factor can be controlled by the nanoparticle size and material. Spectrally, emission peak of luminol overlaps with the absorption band of nanospheres. This maximizes the effect of confined plasmons on the optical density of states in the vicinity of the luminol emission peak. This observations interpreted by us in terms of the Purcell effect mediated by nano-plasmons is an essential step toward the development of microfluidic chips with gain media. Practical implementation of the discovered effect includes improving detection limits of chemiluminescence for the forensic science, research in biology and chemistry, and for a number of commercial applications.