Sensing with surface plasmon resonance in nanohole arrays

ANYL 43

Yeshaiahu Fainman, fainman@ece.ucsd.edu, Department of ECE, MC 0407, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093-0407
Surface plasmon resonance has been used for label-free detection of biochemical reactions, but current approaches may not scale to meet the needs of high throughput applications. We conduct a study of surface plasmon resonance in two-dimensional nanohole arrays for high throughput sensing applications. The samples for SPP sensor experiments are made from gold films on glass substrate using holographic lithography to achieve large areas (~1 cm2). A microfluidic delivery channel is bonded to the substrate. The resonant transmittance of the structure is modified from a Fano to a pure Lorentzian lineshape with a parallel and orthogonal polarizer-analyzer pair. This change leads to a linewidth narrowing that maximizes the sensor resolution, which we show to be of O(10-5) refractive index units (RIU). We estimate the potential of this system to be better than O(10-6) RIU under optimal conditions. Most recent results on dynamic detection of biochemical reactions will be also presented.