In this work we demonstrate that freely oriented individual gold nanorods (GNRs) can be used for sensing variations of the refractive index at the interface between two dielectric media. Both the elastic scattering and the luminescence signal of individual GNRs have been used to characterize the dielectric medium surrounding the particles. The scattering signal depends strongly on the distance from the focusing interface and the refractive index mismatch at the focusing interface, while the luminescence signal is only influenced by the last parameter. We used radially and azimuthally polarized light as an excitation source to directly determine the orientation of individual gold nanorods embedded within a dielectric medium.
