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Gold-Graphene Core-Shell Nanostructure Surface Plasmon Sensors

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Abstract

Localized surface plasmon resonance sensors in nanostructures have wide applications from medical diagnostics to environmental monitoring. The quality and performance of a sensor is normally assessed by its sensitivity and figure of merit (FOM). Generally, localized surface plasmon sensors suffer low FOM due to strong radiative damping of localized surface plasmon and hence broad resonance peaks compared to that one in propagating surface plasmon resonance sensors. In this work, a 2D array of gold-graphene spherical core-shell nanostructure on a quartz substrate was introduced as a liquid sensor with FOM and sensitivity as large as 102.6 and 350 nm/RIU, respectively, in a gold-graphene hybrid nanostructure. The results showed a significant improvement in the FOM compared to previous works and common surface plasmon resonance refractive index surface plasmon sensors such as nanohole arrays.

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Acknowledgments

RA acknowledges Taibah University, Saudi Arabia, for the financial support. RA, MI, and MY would like to acknowledge the National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) for the financial support.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Waterloo Institute for Nanotechnology, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    Raed Alharbi, Mehrdad Irannejad & Mustafa Yavuz

  2. Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    Raed Alharbi, Mehrdad Irannejad & Mustafa Yavuz

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  1. Raed Alharbi
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  2. Mehrdad Irannejad
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Correspondence to Mehrdad Irannejad.

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Alharbi, R., Irannejad, M. & Yavuz, M. Gold-Graphene Core-Shell Nanostructure Surface Plasmon Sensors. Plasmonics 12, 783–794 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11468-016-0325-z

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