Ultrasensitive and highly accurate long-range surface plasmon resonance biosensors based on two-dimensional transition metal dichalcogenides

TL;DR

This paper introduces an ultrasensitive LRSPR biosensor using 2D TMDCs, which enhances detection accuracy and sensitivity beyond conventional sensors, enabling highly precise multi-biomolecular detection.

Contribution

It demonstrates that integrating TMDC layers in LRSPR biosensors improves sensitivity and accuracy, differing from graphene-based sensors where sensitivity decreases with more layers.

Findings

Imaging sensitivity exceeds 4000 RIU^{-1}

Detection accuracy surpasses 120 degrees^{-1}

Sensitivity can be tuned by adjusting gold and cytop layer thicknesses

Abstract

Two-dimensional transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs), as promising alternative plasmonics supporting materials to graphene, exhibit potential applications in sensing. Here, we propose an ultrasensitive, accurate long-range surface plasmon resonance (LRSPR) imaging biosensor with two-dimensional TMDC layers, which shows higher detection accuracy than that of conventional SPR biosensor. It is found that the imaging sensitivity of the proposed LRSPR biosensor can be enhanced by the integration of TMDC layers, which is different from the previous graphene-based LRSPR or SPR imaging sensor, whose imaging sensitivity usually decreases with the number of graphene layers. The sensitivity enhancement or degradation effect for the proposed chalcogenide-cytop-gold-TMDCs based biosensor depends on the thickness of gold thin film and cytop layer. Imaging sensitivity of more than 4000 $\text{RIU}^{-1}$ can be obtained with a high detection accuracy of more than 120 $\text{deg}^{-1}$. We expect that the proposed TMDCs mediated LRSPR imaging sensor could provide potential applications in chemical sensing and biosensing for a highly sensitive and accurate simultaneous detection of multiple biomolecular interactions.