Ultrasensitive Surface Plasmon Resonance Biosensor Using Blue Phosphorus–Graphene Architecture

This study theoretically proposed a novel surface plasmon resonance biosensor by incorporating emerging two dimensional material blue phosphorus and graphene layers with plasmonic gold film. The excellent performances employed for biosensing can be realized by accurately tuning the thickness of gold film and the number of blue phosphorus interlayer. Our proposed plasmonic biosensor architecture designed by phase modulation is much superior to angular modulation, providing 4 orders of magnitude sensitivity enhancement. In addition, the optimized stacked configuration is 42 nm Au film/2-layer blue phosphorus /4-layer graphene, which can produce the sharpest differential phase of 176.7661 degrees and darkest minimum reflectivity as low as 5.3787 × 10(−6). For a tiny variation in local refractive index of 0.0012 RIU (RIU, refractive index unit) due to the binding interactions of aromatic biomolecules, our proposed biosensor can provide an ultrahigh detection sensitivity up to 1.4731 × 10(5) °/RIU, highly promising for performing ultrasensitive biosensing application.