Plasmon-enhanced second harmonic sensing

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a plasmonic nanoantenna-based sensor utilizing enhanced second harmonic generation (SHG) to achieve higher sensitivity in detecting environmental refractive index changes compared to linear methods.

Contribution

It introduces a novel SHG-based sensing platform with improved sensitivity, surpassing traditional linear plasmonic sensors, and evaluates its performance in a microfluidic setup.

Findings

Nonlinear SHG sensing achieves at least 3 times higher FOM than linear sensing.

Minimum detectable refractive index change is approximately 10^{-3}.

Surface sensitivity of SHG enables high-performance sensing within microfluidic devices.

Abstract

It has been recently suggested that the nonlinear optical processes in plasmonic nanoantennas allow for a substantial boost in the sensitivity of plasmonic sensing platforms. Here we present a sensing device based on an array of non-centrosymmetric plasmonic nanoantennas featuring enhanced second harmonic generation (SHG) integrated in a microfluidic chip. We evaluate its sensitivity both in the linear and nonlinear regime using a figure of merit (FOM = $(\Delta I/I)/\Delta n$) that accounts for the relative change in the measured intensity, \textit{I}, against the variation of the environmental refractive index \textit{n}. While the signal-to-noise ratio achieved in both regimes allows the detection of a minimum refractive index variation $\Delta n_{min} \approx 10^{-3}$, the platform operation in the nonlinear regime features a sensitivity (i.e. the FOM) that is at least 3 times higher than the linear one. Thanks to the surface sensitivity of plasmon-enhanced SHG, our results show that the development of such SHG sensing platforms with sensitivity performances exceeding those of their linear counterparts is within reach.