Plasmon resonance modulated photoluminescence and Raman spectroscopy of diindenoperylene organic semiconductor thin film

In a comparison between a bare diindenoperylene (DIP) film and a DIP film spin-coated with a layer of gold nanoparticles, we have investigated the influence of plasmon resonances in the gold particles on spectroscopic properties of the molecular film. Under off-resonant excitation with a laser at 633 nm, the bare DIP film showed only weak photoluminescence (PL) and Raman signals, but after spin-coating gold nanoparticles on such a DIP film, we found an enhancement of both the PL and Raman signals by a factor of about 3, whereas no enhancement could be observed when the same sample was excited with laser light of 488 nm. This difference reveals that at 633 nm, plasmon resonances in the gold nanoparticles are excited, leading in turn to an enhancement of PL and Raman signals of the weakly absorbing DIP film via coupling between plasmons in the gold particles and exciton–polaritons in the molecular film. For the laser at 488 nm, due to a much larger absorption coefficient of DIP, excitons in the molecular film are directly excited, out-weighing the influence of an off-resonant coupling to the plasmon resonances in the gold particles occurring at much lower energy.