Plasmon enhanced linear and nonlinear optical properties of natural curcumin dye with silver nanoparticles

The interactions between silver nanoparticles and bio molecules have potential significance in many interesting applications like sensing, imaging etc. In the present work, the variation in the fluorescence emission and nonlinear optical response of natural Curcumin dye extracted from the Curcuma longa with laser synthesized silver nanoparticles was studied. The formation and optical properties of silver nanoparticles and Curcumin dye solutions were analyzed using UV?Visible absorption spectroscopy, fluorescence emission spectroscopy and fluorescence life time studies. The third order nonlinear optical behavior of the Curcumin dye samples with incorporation of varying concentration of silver nanoparticles were investigated using open aperture Z-scan method. A substantial enhancement was observed for the entire optical behavior such as non-linear optical response, optical limiting properties and fluorescence emission of the Curcumin samples with silver nanoparticles, which progressively improved with the concentration of the silver nanoparticles incorporated into the system.