High performing phase-based surface plasmon resonance sensing from metallic nanohole arrays

We show the spectral figure-of-merit (FOM) from nanohole arrays can be larger than 1900/RIU by phase-based surface plasmon resonance. By using temporal coupled mode theory, we find the p-s polarization phase jump is the sharpest when both the absorption and radiative decay rates of surface plasmon polaritons are matched, yielding an extremely small spectral differential phase linewidth and thus superior FOM. The result is supported by numerical simulation and experiment. As a demonstration, we show the phase detection outperforms the conventional spectral counterpart significantly by sensing the binding of bovine serum albumin antibodies under identical condition. (C) 2014 AIP Publishing LLC.