Nanocrescent Optical Antennas for Ultrafast Photonic PCR

Abstract

Ultrafast photonic polymerase chain reaction (PCR), which thermal cycling utilizing rapid plasmonic conversion of the light to heat drastically reduced time-consuming thermal cycling step. However, to enable rapid precision medicine in the point-of-care (POC), quantitative and multiplexed realtime PCR is necessary. Here we present a hexagonally packed nanocrescent optical antenna array for realtime ultrafast photonic PCR. We theoretically demonstrated that each nanocrescent antennae have an internal cavity with ∼ 0.1 fL volume and liquid within the cavity is heated up from 25 °C to 95 °C in nanosecond scale. We also experimentally demonstrated that hexagonally packed nanocrescent cavity heater array exhibited fast heating in the macroscale (22.4 ± 3.1 °C). In order to demonstrate real-time PCR on the chip, we integrated hexagonally packed nanocrescent array to the microfluidic chip. We believe that this hexagonally packed nanocrescent optical antenna impact both life science and ultrafast precision molecular diagnostics.