Ultra-sensitive acoustic biosensor based on a 1D phononic crystal

Abstract

In this work, we introduce an ultra-sensitive acoustic biosensor based on a 1D phononic crystal (1D-PnC) to measure separately albumin, hemoglobin and hemocyanin concentrations. This study represents a new type of acoustic biosensors with very high sensitivity in a very broad molar ratio range. Lead-epoxy 1D-PnC multilayer stack confining a defect layer from the biomaterials to generate strong and well-separated resonance modes within the phononic band gap is proposed. For albumin, we calculated a sensitivity value of about 3.5 MHz over a concentration range between 0%–36%. For hemoglobin, the sensitivity was about 3.314 MHz over a concentration range between 0%–14%. For hemocyanin, the sensitivity was about 3.41 MHz over a concentration range between 0%–15.5%. Besides the sensitivity, the 1D-PnC showed high performance represented by high Q-factor and figure of merit values. The transfer matrix method is adopted for calculating the transmission coefficient of the incident acoustic wave. We believe these results could be useful in the design of an effective biosensor especially it has many merits such as low cost, ease of fabrication, high sensitivity, and absence of any electronic component.