Sensitivity Enhancement of Transition Metal Dichalcogenides/Silicon Nanostructure-based Surface Plasmon Resonance Biosensor

In this work, we designed a sensitivity-enhanced surface plasmon resonance biosensor structure based on silicon nanosheet and two-dimensional transition metal dichalcogenides. This configuration contains six components: SF10 triangular prism, gold thin film, silicon nanosheet, two-dimensional MoS(2)/MoSe(2)/WS(2)/WSe(2) (defined as MX(2)) layers, biomolecular analyte layer and sensing medium. The minimum reflectivity, sensitivity as well as the Full Width at Half Maximum of SPR curve are systematically examined by using Fresnel equations and the transfer matrix method in the visible and near infrared wavelength range (600 nm to 1024 nm). The variation of the minimum reflectivity and the change in resonance angle as the function of the number of MX(2) layers are presented respectively. The results show that silicon nanosheet and MX(2) layers can be served as effective light absorption medium. Under resonance conditions, the electrons in these additional dielectric layers can be transferred to the surface of gold thin film. All silicon-MX(2) enhanced sensing models show much better performance than that of the conventional sensing scheme where pure Au thin film is used, the highest sensitivity can be achieved by employing 600 nm excitation light wavelength with 35 nm gold thin film and 7 nm thickness silicon nanosheet coated with monolayer WS(2).