Defect-assisted plasmonic crystal sensor

We demonstrate enhanced sensitivity of a nanostructured plasmonic sensor that utilizes resonance in intentional structural defects within a plasmonic crystal. The measured sensitivity of the fabricated nanosensor is similar to 500 nm/RIU showing improvement over traditional nanohole array sensors. Furthermore, the defects provide an additional design parameter to increase sensitivity by engineering plasmon lifetime. (C) 2013 Optical Society of America