Exploiting the design of surface plasmon resonance interfaces for better diagnostics: A perspective review

Template-Stripped Truncated Nanoscale Pyramid Arrays for Refractive Index Sensing

“…Plasmonic nanostructures provide an enticing prospect in a wide range of chemical, optical sensing, and biomedical applications due to their unequaled optical confinement exceeding the diffraction limit. − The spatial localization of the light field causes numerous capacity densities on the top surfaces of metallic nanostructures, which enhances light-matter interactions in a nanoscale region. − This remarkable feature endows them with a high sensitivity to the surrounding medium’s refractive index (RI) variations. A typical example is preparing a high-performance RI sensor, which has emerged as a promising platform for biosensing, environmental monitoring, food security management, and gas detection applications. − It should be noticed that various metasurfaces based on metal-dielectric composites or all-dielectric have usually been used to construct RI sensors. − For instance, a photonic crystal metasurface based on the bound state in the continuum has been applied for label-free sensing of ultralow-weight molecules . Actually, two fundamental characteristics are used to evaluate the sensing performance, including the sensitivity (defined by the spectral shift per refractive index unit) and the figure of merit (FOM, the ratio of their sensitivity to the full width at half-maximum (FWHM) of the resonances).…”