Plasmonic Nanoarchitectures for Single-Molecule Explorations: An Overview

Plasmonic nanostructures have immense potentials for extreme concentration of light into deep-subwavelength spaces with giant local field intensity, which can be exploited for novel applications including nanoscale optical trapping, biosensing, and enhanced spectroscopy. Herein, a succinct overview of the potentials of engineered plasmonic nanoarchitectures of various geometries including nanoparticles, nanodimers, nanoapertures, nanoporous surfaces, and picometer-scale gap systems for single-molecule analysis is provided. In particular, the potentials of single plasmonic nanoparticles for single-molecule sensing, coupled plasmonic nanodimers for few-molecule strong coupling, metallic nanocavities for optical manipulation of single molecules, nanoporous metasurfaces for enhanced singlemolecule spectroscopy, and plasmonic picocavities for single-molecule optomechanics are extensively discussed. Finally, as an outlook, exploiting such novel nanoarchitectures for developing innovative biosensing platforms that will be able to trap and detect objects at the single-molecule level is forwarded.