Fiber-Optic Localized Surface Plasmon Resonance Sensors Based on Nanomaterials

Abstract

Applying fiber-optics on surface plasmon resonance (SPR) sensors is aimed at practical usability over conventional SPR sensors. Recently, field localization techniques using nanostructures or nanoparticles have been investigated on optical fibers for further sensitivity enhancement and significant target selectivity. In this review article, we explored varied recent research approaches of fiber-optics based localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) sensors. The article contains interesting experimental results using fiber-optic LSPR sensors for three different application categories: (1) chemical reactions measurements, (2) physical properties measurements, and (3) biological events monitoring. In addition, novel techniques which can create synergy combined with fiber-optic LSPR sensors were introduced. The review article suggests fiber-optic LSPR sensors have lots of potential for measurements of varied targets with high sensitivity. Moreover, the previous results show that the sensitivity enhancements which can be applied with creative varied plasmonic nanomaterials make it possible to detect minute changes including quick chemical reactions and tiny molecular activities.

Flexible and Ultrathin Metal-Oxide Films for Multiresonance-Based Sensors in Plastic Optical Fibers

“…To realize even more efficient sensor systems, SPR, LSPR, and LMR can be coupled with optical fibers so taking advantage of the excellent properties related to these guiding structures, like immunity to electromagnetic interferences, the possibility of remote sensing and so on [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13].…”

Surface Plasmon Resonance Sensor Based on Double-Sided Polished Microstructured Optical Fiber With Hollow Core

“…Among the various kinds of the SPR sensing configurations, the microstructured optical fiber (MOF) can be immaculately integrated with SPR, owing to its small size, lesser weight, flexible structure, fast response and more practical [20]- [39]. Compared with the other types of SPR sensors, such as prism based SPR and optical fiber based SPR sensors [1]- [19], the main advantage of flexible structure of the MOF is that it can alleviate phase-matching problem between the core mode and the surface plasmon polariton (SPP) mode, and thus improving the sensitivity [20]- [23], [34]- [39]. However, there are two major problems in the MOF-SPR sensors: one is the difficult fabrication of sensor and the other is the broadened spectral width of the resonance peaks.…”

Surface Plasmonic Sensors: Sensing Mechanism and Recent Applications

“…The variation of background permittivity will lead to the spectral shift (correspondingly for wavelength) of LSPR, which is the basic sensing mechanism [ 62 ]. Recently, Khan et al [ 63 ] systematically measured and analyzed the sensitivities of a group of LSPR structures ( Figure 2 a).…”

“…Although plasmonic sensors have been realized and commercialized successfully on different platforms, their sensitivity and associated precision are starting to reach the shot noise limit by quantum fluctuations of light [ 36 , 238 ]. To go beyond sensitivity limit by the SNL, the combination of quantum metrology with plasmonic sensing is increasingly being implemented in the field of chemistry and biology [ 62 , 239 ]. This emerging field is called “quantum plasmonic sensing” [ 19 ].…”