Fabrication and study of a metal-clad planar waveguide based biosensor

Abstract

A metal-clad planar optical waveguide biosensor having five layer structure has been fabricated to study the detection of Pseudomonas and Pseudomonas-like bacteria. This waveguide is designed to increase the overlap of the evanescent field extension from the sensor face with the micro-scale biological objects in the bulk solution, to place most of the entire volume of the bacteria within the evanescent field. The results presented here leads to a significant optimization of the important design parameters to sense micro-scale biological objects. We have compared our computed results with the results obtained by similar non-metallic clad biosensor. The effect of affinity-layer refractive index on the sensitivity of these planar waveguides is also studied. We have shown this for some special cases by obtaining reflection dips at the particular angle of incidence. Our observations show that the metal-clad planar optical waveguide biosensor having higher affinity refractive index will give better sensitivity than other similar non-metallic clad biosensor. The validation of metal-clad planar optical waveguide sensor for the detection of Pseudomonas aeruginosa bacterium is also made.