Self-referenced spectroscopy using plasmon waveguide resonance biosensor

Farshid Bahrami; Mathieu Maisonneuve; Michel Meunier; J Stewart Aitchison; Mo Mojahedi

doi:10.1364/BOE.5.002481

Self-referenced spectroscopy using plasmon waveguide resonance biosensor

Biomed Opt Express. 2014 Jul 3;5(8):2481-7. doi: 10.1364/BOE.5.002481. eCollection 2014 Aug 1.

Authors

Farshid Bahrami¹, Mathieu Maisonneuve², Michel Meunier², J Stewart Aitchison¹, Mo Mojahedi¹

Affiliations

¹ Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Toronto, Ontario, M5S 3G4, Canada.
² Department of Engineering Physics, Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal, Montreal, H3C 3A7, Canada.

Abstract

A plasmon waveguide resonance (PWR) sensor is designed, fabricated, and tested for self-referenced biosensing. The PWR sensor is able to support two different polarizations, TM and TE. The TM polarization has a large sensitivity to variations in the background refractive index while the TE polarization is more sensitive to the surface properties. The ability of the PWR sensor to simultaneously operate in both TM and TE modes is used to decouple the background index variations (bulk effects) from the changes in adlayer thickness (surface effects) via multimode spectroscopy. To benchmark the performance of the PWR, a conventional surface plasmon resonance (SPR) sensor is fabricated and tested under the same conditions.

Keywords: (250.5403) Plasmonics; (280.4788) Optical sensing and sensors.