High surface plasmon resonance sensitivity enabled by optical disks

Abstract

We report a systematic, experimental, and theoretical investigation on the surface plasmon resonance (SPR) sensing using optical disks with different track pitches, including Blu-ray disk (BD), digital versatile disk (DVD), and compact disk (CD). Optical reflection measurements indicate that CD and DVD exhibit much higher SPR sensitivity than BD. Both experiments and finite-difference time-domain simulations reveal that the SPR sensitivity is significantly affected by the diffraction order of the SPR peaks and higher diffraction order results in lower sensitivity. Numerical simulations also show that very high sensitivity (∼1600 nm per refractive index unit) is achievable by CDs.