Abstract
Plasmonics has been developed to overcome the serious limitations in design of sub-wavelength scale optical components. Plasmonic waveguides can be used as optical biosensors. Recently, various waveguide structures have been proposed for sensing applications. Main challenges of them are weak confinement of their guided modes in sensing region and consequently their weak interaction with analytes, which lead to low values for the sensitivity. The reported maximum sensitivity for available plasmonic waveguide-based biosensors are about 1.1–2.6 W/RIU. In this study, two compact plasmonic waveguides, referred as surface plasmon slot waveguide (SPSW) and sub-metal dielectric loaded surface plasmon slot waveguide (SDL-SPSW) are proposed for refractive-index sensing applications. SDL-SPSW has a high optical confinement in the sensing region, which reduces its required transverse cross-sectional area and increases the interaction of optical field with analyte molecules. The calculated sensitivity for SPSW and SDL-SPSW are about 0.63 W/RIU and 1.15 W/RIU, respectively for λ = 632.8 nm. It has been shown that the sensitivity of SDL-SPSW can be enhanced for longer wavelengths and the maximum value of 2.3 W/RIU is observed for λ = 1000 nm. The modal effective area of the SDL-SPSW structure is about 7.77×10−2 μm2.
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