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Plasmonic nanorod metamaterials for biosensing

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Abstract

Label-free plasmonic biosensors rely either on surface plasmon polaritons or on localized surface plasmons on continuous or nanostructured noble-metal surfaces to detect molecular-binding events1,2,3,4. Despite undisputed advantages, including spectral tunability3, strong enhancement of the local electric field5,6 and much better adaptability to modern nanobiotechnology architectures7, localized plasmons demonstrate orders of magnitude lower sensitivity compared with their guided counterparts3. Here, we demonstrate an improvement in biosensing technology using a plasmonic metamaterial that is capable of supporting a guided mode in a porous nanorod layer. Benefiting from a substantial overlap between the probing field and the active biological substance incorporated between the nanorods and a strong plasmon-mediated energy confinement inside the layer, this metamaterial provides an enhanced sensitivity to refractive-index variations of the medium between the rods (more than 30,000 nm per refractive-index unit). We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach using a standard streptavidin–biotin affinity model and record considerable improvement in the detection limit of small analytes compared with conventional label-free plasmonic devices.

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Figure 1: Plasmonic nanorod metamaterial and the properties of the electromagnetic mode used for sensing experiments.
Figure 2: Optical resonances of the plasmonic nanorod metamaterial in different surroundings.
Figure 3: Investigation of the origin of the sensing mode.
Figure 4: The nanorod-based sensor calibration and observation of the test binding reaction.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by The Royal Society and the EPSRC (UK). V.A.P. acknowledges support from ONR (Grant No. N00014-07-1-0457) and NSF (Grant No. ECCS-0724763). The authors are grateful to T. W. Odom for insightful discussions of sensing parameters.

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Author notes

  1. G. A. Wurtz

    Present address: Present address: Department of Chemistry and Physics, University of North Florida, Jacksonville, Florida 32224, USA,

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratoire Lasers, Plasmas et Procédés Photoniques (LP3 UMR 6182 CNRS), Faculté des Sciences de Luminy, Université de Méditerranée, 163 Avenue de Luminy, 13288 Marseille Cedex 09, France

    A. V. Kabashin

  2. Department of Engineering Physics, École Polytechnique de Montréal, Québec H3C 3A7, Canada

    A. V. Kabashin & S. Pastkovsky

  3. Centre for Nanostructured Media, The Queen’s University of Belfast, Belfast BT7 1NN, UK

    P. Evans, W. Hendren, G. A. Wurtz, R. Atkinson, R. Pollard & A. V. Zayats

  4. Physics Department, Oregon State University, 301 Weniger Hall, Corvallis, Oregon 97331, USA

    V. A. Podolskiy

Authors
  1. A. V. Kabashin
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  2. P. Evans
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  3. S. Pastkovsky
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  4. W. Hendren
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  5. G. A. Wurtz
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  6. R. Atkinson
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  7. R. Pollard
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  8. V. A. Podolskiy
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  9. A. V. Zayats
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Contributions

All authors contributed extensively to the work presented in this letter.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to A. V. Zayats.

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Kabashin, A., Evans, P., Pastkovsky, S. et al. Plasmonic nanorod metamaterials for biosensing. Nature Mater 8, 867–871 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat2546

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