Design of an optical sensor based on plasmonic nanostructures

Abstract

Plasmonic nano-structured array sensors have been highlighted by their tremendously promising applications, such as the surface plasmon resonance (SPR) optical biosensors. In this paper, within the visible spectrum region, the optical transmission properties of a metallic thin film deposited over dielectric films of various refraction indices are investigated. With finite difference time domain (FDTD) method, we investigate the optical transmission spectra of such plasmonic structures based on both nano-holes and nano-disc arrays. This investigation includes monitoring the modification in both the transmission resonance wavelengths and peak transmittance. The results of this study provide a better understanding of the interaction between light and plasmonic nano-hole and nano-disc arrays. It shows that the changing the shapes of the nano-holes can affect the resonance wavelengths and the intensity of transmitted spectra and alter its resonance peak transmittance values. We found that the interaction coupling between the localized plasmons (LSP) and the propagating surface plasmons (PSP) can be tuned to boost the performance of the optical sensor.