Boosting the Figure-Of-Merit of LSPR-Based Refractive Index Sensing by Phase-Sensitive Measurements
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- 作者：Kristof Lodewijks ; Willem Van Roy ; Gustaaf Borghs ; Liesbet Lagae ; Pol Van Dorpe
- 刊名：Nano Letters
- 出版年：2012
- 出版时间：March 14, 2012
- 年：2012
- 卷：12
- 期：3
- 页码：1655-1659
- 全文大小：335K
- 年卷期：v.12,no.3(March 14, 2012)
- ISSN：1530-6992
文摘
Localized surface plasmon resonances possess very interesting properties for a wide variety of sensing applications. In many of the existing applications, only the intensity of the reflected or transmitted signals is taken into account, while the phase information is ignored. At the center frequency of a (localized) surface plasmon resonance, the electron cloud makes the transition between in- and out-of-phase oscillation with respect to the incident wave. Here we show that this information can experimentally be extracted by performing phase-sensitive measurements, which result in linewidths that are almost 1 order of magnitude smaller than those for intensity based measurements. As this phase change is an intrinsic property of a plasmon resonance, this opens up many possibilities for boosting the figure-of-merit (FOM) of refractive index sensing by taking into account the phase of the plasmon resonance. We experimentally investigated this for two model systems: randomly distributed gold nanodisks and gold nanorings on top of a continuous gold layer and a dielectric spacer and observed FOM values up to 8.3 and 16.5 for the respective nanoparticles.