A theoretical design of evanescent wave biosensors based on gate-controlled graphene surface plasmon resonance

A surface plasmon resonance (SPR) sensor based on gate-controlled periodic graphene ribbons array is reported. Different from the conventional methods by monitoring reflectivity variations with respect to incident angle or wavelength, this approach measures the change in SPR curve against the variation of graphene chemical potential (via dynamically tuning the gate voltage) at both fixed incident angle and wavelength without the need of rotating mirror, tunable filter or spectrometer for angular or wavelength interrogation. Theoretical calculations show that the sensitivities are 36,401.1 mV/RIU, 40,676.5 mV/RIU, 40,918.2 mV/RIU, and 41,160 mV/RIU for analyte refractive index (RI) equal to 1.33, 1.34, 1.35 and 1.36; their figure of merit (1/RIU) are 21.84, 24, 23.74 and 23.69, respectively. Significantly, the enhancement in the non-uniform local field due to the subwavelength graphene ribbon resonator can facilitate the detection in redistribution of protein monolayers modeled as dielectric bricks.