Freestanding metal nanohole array for high-performance applications

Plasmonic devices using periodic metallic nanostructures have recently gained tremendous interest for color filters, sensing, surface enhanced spectroscopy, and enhanced photoluminescence, etc. However, the performance of such plasmonic devices is severely hampered by the solid substrates supporting the metallic nanostructures. Here, a strategy for freestanding metallic nanomembranes is introduced by taking advantages of hollow substrate structures. Large-area and highly uniform gold nanomembranes with nanohole array are fabricated via a flexible and simple replication-releasing method. The hollow structures include a hollow core fiber with 30 μm core diameter and two ferrules with their hole diameter as 125 and 500 μm, respectively. As a proof-of-concept demonstration, 2 times higher sensitivity of the bulk refractive index is obtained with this platform compared to that of a counterpart on a solid silica substrate. Such a portable and compact configuration provides unique opportunities to explore the intrinsic properties of the metal nanomembranes and paves a new way to fabricate high-performance plasmonic devices for biomolecule sensing and color filter.