A Critical Analysis on the Sensitivity Enhancement of Surface Plasmon Resonance Sensors with Graphene

Abstract

The use of graphene in surface plasmon resonance sensors, covering a metallic (plasmonic) film, has a number of demonstrated advantages, such as protecting the film against corrosion/oxidation and facilitating the introduction of functional groups for selective sensing. Recently, a number of works have claimed that few-layer graphene can also increase the sensitivity of the sensor. However, graphene was treated as an isotropic thin film, with an out-of-plane refractive index that is identical to the in-plane index. Here, we critically examine the role of single and few layers of graphene in the sensitivity enhancement of surface plasmon resonance sensors. Graphene is introduced over the metallic film via three different descriptions: as an atomic-thick two-dimensional sheet, as a thin effective isotropic material (same conductivity in the three coordinate directions), and as an non-isotropic layer (different conductivity in the perpendicular direction to the two-dimensional plane). We find that only the isotropic layer model, which is known to be incorrect for the optical modeling of graphene, provides sizable sensitivity increases, while the other, more accurate, models lead to a negligible contribution to the sensitivity.

Keywords: biosensors; graphene; sensitivity; surface plasmon resonance.

Figure 1

Schematic representation of the SPR sensor.

Figure 2

(a) Three-layer system: graphene as an atomic sheet with a surface conductivity ${\sigma }_g$. (b) Four-layer system: graphene as a thin layer film with thickness d${}_g$ and refractive index $n_3^g$.

Figure 3

(a) Calculated reflectance $\left({\mathrm{R}}_{123\left(1234\right)}\right)$ as a function of the incident angle $\left({\theta }_i\right)$ for analyte refractive indices of 1.332 and 1.342 (red and black curves, respectively). The vertical lines indicate the positions of $\left({\theta }_{SPR}\right)$ for the system without graphene. Graphene modeled as a surface conductivity (dashed lines); and as isotropic $\left(n_3^g\right)$ (dotted lines) and anisotropic $\left(n_{3\mathrm{in}}^g\right)$ (dashed-dotted lines) films. (b) Zoom in the the minimum reflectance region of (a).

Figure 4

Calculated sensitivity increase for the addition of graphene layers compared with the system based only on gold. Graphene as an: atomic sheet (green), isotropic film, $n_3^g=3+1.1491i$ (dark blue) and $n_3^g=2+1.7119i$ (red); anisotropic film, $n_{3\mathrm{in}}^g=2+1.7119i$ (cyan).