Decorative Plasmonic Surfaces

TL;DR

This paper reviews the latest advances in low-profile patterned plasmonic surfaces integrated with silicon microstructures, highlighting their potential to improve nanoscale imaging, sensing, and energy harvesting in MEMS devices.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive review of plasmonic theory, design guidance, fabrication techniques, and applications in biosensing and micro-imaging, emphasizing conformal, low-profile surfaces for MEMS.

Findings

Enhanced near-field nanoscale imaging and sensing capabilities.

Design principles for integrating plasmonics with microsystems.

Applications in biosensing, cellular imaging, and energy harvesting.

Abstract

Low-profile patterned plasmonic surfaces are synergized with a broad class of silicon microstructures to greatly enhance near-field nanoscale imaging, sensing, and energy harvesting coupled with far-field free-space detection. This concept has a clear impact on several key areas of interest for the MEMS community, including but not limited to ultra-compact microsystems for sensitive detection of small number of target molecules, and surface devices for optical data storage, micro-imaging and displaying. In this paper, we review the current state-of-the-art in plasmonic theory as well as derive design guidance for plasmonic integration with microsystems, fabrication techniques, and selected applications in biosensing, including refractive-index based label-free biosensing, plasmonic integrated lab-on-chip systems, plasmonic near-field scanning optical microscopy and plasmonics on-chip systems for cellular imaging. This paradigm enables low-profile conformal surfaces on microdevices, rather than bulk material or coatings, which provide clear advantages for physical, chemical and biological-related sensing, imaging, and light harvesting, in addition to easier realization, enhanced flexibility, and tunability.