A facile chemical synthesis route to fabricate gold films coated fiber optic biosensors

This proof-of-concept study demonstrates a seed-mediated growth technique to synthesize gold film on a U-bent fiber optic sensor probe for plasmonic sensing applications. Here, gold seed nanoparticles were physisorbed on the surface of a U-bent silica probe. Later the seed-immobilized probe was incubated in growth solution for gold film growth. The newly fabricated gold film-coated probe exhibited a surface plasmon peak at 655 nm wavelength and sensitivity of 2271 nm/RIU and a figure of merit of 22.