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The strong interaction of individual quantum emitters with resonant cavities is of fundamental interest for understanding light–matter interactions. Plasmonic cavities hold the promise of attaining the strong coupling regime even under ambient conditions and within subdiffraction volumes. Recent experiments revealed strong coupling between individual plasmonic structures and multiple organic molecules; however, strong coupling at the limit of a single quantum emitter has not been reported so far. Here we demonstrate vacuum Rabi splitting, a manifestation of strong coupling, using silver bowtie plasmonic cavities loaded with semiconductor quantum dots (QDs). A transparency dip is observed in the scattering spectra of individual bowties with one to a few QDs, which are directly counted in their gaps. A coupling rate as high as 120 meV is registered even with a single QD, placing the bowtie-QD constructs close to the strong coupling regime. These observations are verified by polarization-dependent experiments and validated by electromagnetic calculations.

Upon transfer from strongly denaturing to native conditions, proteins undergo a collapse that either precedes folding or occurs simultaneously with it. This collapse is similar to the well known coil-globule transition of polymers. Here we employ singlemolecule fluorescence methods to fully characterize the equilibrium coil-globule transition in the denatured state of the IgGbinding domain of protein L. By using FRET measurements on freely diffusing individual molecules, we determine the radius of gyration of the protein, which shows a gradual expansion as the concentration of the denaturant, guanidinium hydrochloride, is increased all the way up to 7 M. This expansion is observed also in fluorescence correlation spectroscopy measurements of the hydro- fluorescence correlation spectroscopy ͉ protein folding ͉ single-molecule fluorescence T he coil-globule (CG) transition is a hallmark of the physics of polymers in solution. When a polymer molecule is transferred from a good solvent to a bad one, it undergoes a collapse from an expanded coil-like conformation to a contracted, globule-like conformation. This collapse is typically a second-order phase transition and can be accounted well by mean-field theory (1, 2). Proteins are heteropolymers and therefore should exhibit a similar transition. Because proteins also undergo a first-order folding transition to form their native structure, it is of prime interest to deduce the relation between collapse and folding (3). If the CG transition precedes folding significantly, then the final rearrangements of the protein chain to form the native structure occur within a relatively limited configurational space, which might affect the efficiency and speed of the process. The CG transition of proteins is also important for the elucidation of the properties of their denatured states. Chain collapse can have an impact on secondary-structure formation in the denatured protein (4). Determining the energetics of the collapse, which involve changes in the solvation energy of the protein as the solution conditions are varied, might allow us to understand better the role of the denatured state in the folding transition (5).The occurrence of a collapse preceding protein folding was inferred from kinetic experiments (6-11) and also reported in equilibrium experiments, using small-angle x-ray scattering (SAXS) (12) and single-molecule fluorescence (13,14). However, the thermodynamics of the CG transition have not been characterized yet. In this work, we use two methods, singlemolecule FRET (smFRET) and fluorescence correlation spectroscopy (FCS), to measure the CG transition of a 64-amino acid protein exhibiting two-state folding, the IgG-binding domain of protein L (hereafter denoted simply as protein L) (15). The CG transition is driven by the chemical denaturant guanidinium hydrochloride (GuHCl). We then employ a version of the mean-field theory of Sanchez (16) to obtain a full thermodynamic characterization of the CG transition of a protein, identifying the transition point as well ...