Irreversible adsorption of gold nanospheres on fiber optical tapers and microspheres

We study the adsorption of gold nanospheres onto cylindrical and spherical glass surfaces from quiescent particle suspensions. The surfaces consist of tapers and microspheres fabricated from optical fibers and were coated with a polycation, enabling irreversible nanosphere adsorption. Our results fit well with theory, which predicts that particle adsorption rates depend strongly on surface geometry and can exceed the planar surface deposition rate by over two orders of magnitude when particle diffusion length is large compared to surface curvature. This is particularly important for plasmonic sensors and other devices fabricated by depositing nanoparticles from suspensions onto surfaces with non-trivial geometries. (C) 2012 American Institute of Physics. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.3701730]