Aluminum Plasmonics: Fabrication and Characterization of Broadly Tunable Plasmonic Surfaces for Plasmon Molecule Strong-Coupling and Fluorescence Enhancement

Our work based on previous studies [1, 2] confirms, that simple aluminum nanostructures can be utilized as effective plasmonic resonators over a broad range of frequencies and wavelengths. The nanostructured surfaces, fabricated by electron-beam lithography demonstrated relatively narrow-band resonances and are suitable for various plasmonic applications ranging from metal enhanced fluorescence to strong-coupling [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] experiments. We represent data for molecule-plasmon coupling near the strong coupling limit and demonstrate that these aluminum structures do act as fluorescence increasing substrates. In this work, we used two different types of dyes. We studied the narrow band j-a…