Attomolar Detection of Low-Molecular Weight Antibiotics Using Midinfrared-Resonant Toroidal Plasmonic Metachip Technology

Plasmonic metamaterials can be used to enhance midinfrared sensors and detectors for immunosensing applications. The major challenge with them is to integrate these technologies in low-cost, compact, and promising platforms. As an emerging technique, we utilize toroidal resonant plasmonic metamaterials to develop an ultrasensitive label-free analytical platform for the detection of specific antibiotics in the midinfrared spectra. Taking advantage of the unique sensitivity of robustly squeezed electromagnetic fields in the toroidal plasmonic meta-atoms, we demonstrate that our proposed approach based on toroidal metastructures provides recognition of extremely-low-weight (approximately 0.6 KDa) biological targets at attomolar densities. We envisage that this understanding extends the capabilities of plasmonic metamaterials to analyze the presence of specific biological molecules and organisms with ultrahigh precision.