Design study of highly sensitive nanowire-enhanced surface plasmon resonance biosensors using rigorous coupled wave analysis

In this study, we investigated the sensitivity enhancement in nanowire-based surface plasmon resonance (SPR) biosensors using rigorous coupled wave analysis (RCWA). The enhancement, enabled by the excitation of localized surface plasmons in gold nanowires, offers improved performance in sensitivity as well as in reproducibility and customizability. Calculation results found that a T-profile provides higher sensitivity than an inverse T-profile in general and also determined optimum design parameters. Our study on a nanowire- enhanced SPR biosensor demonstrates the potential for significant improvement in the sensitivity through the nanowire- mediated localized SPR. (C) 2005 Optical Society of America.