A THz graphene metasurface for polarization selective virus sensing

We propose a novel method to exploit chirality of highly sensitive graphene plasmonic metasurfaces to characterize complex refractive indexes (RI) of viruses by detecting the polarization state of the reflected electric fields in the THz spectrum. A dispersive graphene metasurface is designed to produce chiral surface currents to couple linearly polarized incident fields to circularly polarized reflected fields. The metasurface sensing sensitivity is the result of surface plasmon currents that flow in a chiral fashion with strong intensity due to the underlying geometrical resonance. Consequently, unique polarization states are observed in the far-field with the ellipticity values that change rapidly with the analyte's RI. The determination of bimolecular RI is treated as an inverse problem in which the polarization states of the virus is compared with a pre-calculated calibration model that is obtained by full-wave electromagnetic simulations. We demonstrate the polarization selective sensing method by RI discrimination of three different types of Avian Influenza (AI) viruses including H1N1, H5N2, and H9N2 is possible. Since the proposed virus characterization method only requires determination of the polarization ellipses including its orientation at monochromatic frequency, the required instrumentation is simpler compared to traditional spectroscopic methods which need a broadband frequency scan. (C) 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Automated summary

A novel method utilizing the chirality of highly sensitive graphene plasmonic metasurfaces is proposed to characterize the complex refractive indexes of viruses by detecting the polarization state of the reflected electric fields in the THz spectrum. The method exploits chiral surface currents to couple linearly polarized incident fields to circularly polarized reflected fields, resulting in unique polarization states in the far-field with ellipticity values that change rapidly with the analyte's refractive index. The method demonstrates potential for virus characterization with simpler instrumentation compared to traditional spectroscopic methods.