Abstract
Low-dimensional van der Waals (vdW) materials can harness tightly confined polaritonic waves to deliver unique advantages for nanophotonic biosensing. The reduced dimensionality of vdW materials, as in the case of two-dimensional graphene, can greatly enhance plasmonic field confinement, boosting sensitivity and efficiency compared to conventional nanophotonic devices that rely on surface plasmon resonance in metallic films. Furthermore, the reduction of dielectric screening in vdW materials enables electrostatic tunability of different polariton modes, including plasmons, excitons, and phonons. One-dimensional vdW materials, particularly single-walled carbon nanotubes, possess unique form factors with confined excitons to enable single-molecule detection as well as in vivo biosensing. We discuss basic sensing principles based on vdW materials, followed by technological challenges such as surface chemistry, integration, and toxicity. Finally, we highlight progress in harnessing vdW materials to demonstrate new sensing functionalities that are difficult to perform with conventional metal/dielectric sensors.
Highlights
1234567890():,; Low-dimensional van der Waals materials can harness tightly confined polaritonic waves to deliver unique advantages for nanophotonic biosensing
We explore the potentials of van der Waals (vdW) materials for nanophotonic biosensing (Fig. 2)
We have explored nanophotonic biosensing technologies enabled by low-dimensional vdW materials
Summary
Sang-Hyun Oh 1✉, Hatice Altug 2✉, Xiaojia Jin 3, Tony Low[1], Steven J. To miniaturize and further improve the performance of SPR sensors, researchers have leveraged both top-down lithography and bottom-up synthesis to build “nanoplasmonic” sensors by engineering the flat gold films of conventional SPR into nanoparticles, nanoholes, or collections of sub-wavelength unit cells called “metasurfaces” of various shapes Such nanostructures and metasurfaces can extend resonances to broader frequency ranges (i.e., from visible to near- or mid-IR), and exhibit optical phenomena such as localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR), radiative coupling, and extraordinary optical transmission[7–9]. The reduced dimensionality of these materials enhances plasmonic field confinement, and their much-reduced dielectric screening confers sensitive electrostatic tunability and enables the excitation of different polariton modes such as plasmons, excitons, and phonons (Fig. 2a–c) for new sensing modalities[24–26]. While still a nascent technology relative to ELISA or SPR, two of the most extensively studied low-dimensional vdW structures—one-dimensional (1D) single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) and two-dimensional (2D) graphene—have already demonstrated novel sensing capabilities that are inaccessible to metal/dielectric nanophotonic sensors. Graphene plasmonics has demonstrated the unique potential for dynamically tunable infrared absorption spectroscopy for probing structural changes in molecules and a c e f g
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