High-Q plasmonic crystal laser for ultra-sensitive biomolecule detection

TL;DR

This paper presents a high-Q plasmonic crystal laser with a nanohole array on gold, demonstrating exceptional sensitivity for biochemical sensing through numerical analysis, surpassing previous biosensor designs.

Contribution

The study introduces a novel high-Q plasmonic crystal laser architecture with detailed numerical analysis, showing significantly improved sensing performance over prior designs.

Findings

Enhanced surface sensing figures of merit by over an order of magnitude.

Numerical analysis confirms high lasing performance and environmental sensitivity.

Design potential for highly integrated, ultra-sensitive biosensing devices.

Abstract

Plasmonic lasers provide a paradigm-changing approach for the generation of coherent light at the nanoscale. In addition to the usual properties of coherent radiation, the emission of plasmonic lasers can feature high sensitivity to the surrounding environment, which makes this technology attractive for developing high-performance and highly-integrated sensing devices. Here, we investigate a plasmonic laser architecture based on a high-Q plasmonic crystal consisting of a periodic arrangement of nanoholes on a thin gold film cladded with an organic-dye-doped SiO$_2$ gain layer as the gain material. We report an extensive full-wave numerical analysis of the device's lasing performance and its application as a biochemical sensor, showing that the proposed design features excellent figures of merit for surface sensing that in principle can be over an order of magnitude larger than those of previously reported high-performance plasmonic biosensor architectures.