Nanostructured plasmonic chips employing nanopillar and nanoring hole arrays for enhanced sensitivity of SPR-based biosensing

We present a theoretical analysis of the different nanostructured plasmonic sensor chips—consisting of plasmonic nanostructures present on the surface of plasmonic thin films—interrogated using the Kretschmann configuration for highly sensitive localized sensing, with high tunability from the visible to the infrared regions. Rigorous coupled-wave analysis is performed to analyze all the proposed nanostructured sensor chips and compare their sensing performance. The sensitivity parameters are defined to focus on the detection of a thin layer of biomolecules on the surface of nanostructures. The dimensions of the nanostructures and the incident angle shift the plasmon resonance wavelengths and can be used to tune the operating wavelength. The nanostructured films create local regions of high electric fields, which results in enhanced sensitivity of the proposed structures. The proposed sensors can be used in surface plasmon resonance imaging to detect multiple biomolecules in a single measurement. An extremely high surface sensitivity and figure of merit (FOM(S)) of 91 nm nm(−1) and 0.59 nm(−1) has been found, respectively, for one of the proposed nanostructured sensing platforms. Moreover, we demonstrate a very high differential reflectance of 55% per nm thickness of the biolayer.