title: Design and analysis of a spectro-angular surface plasmon resonance biosensor operating in the visible spectrum.
abstract: Surface plasmon resonance (SPR) sensing is one of the most widely used methods to implement biosensing due to its sensitivity and capacity for label-free detection. Whilst most commercial SPR sensors operate in the angular regime, it has recently been shown that an increase in sensitivity and a greater robustness against noise can be achieved by measuring the reflectivity when varying both the angle and wavelength simultaneously, in a so-called spectro-angular SPR biosensor. A single value decomposition method is used to project the two-dimensional spectro-angular reflection signal onto a basis set and allow the image obtained from an unknown refractive index sample to be compared very accurately with a pre-calculated reference set. Herein we demonstrate that a previously reported system operated in the near infra-red has a lower detection limit when operating in the visible spectrum due to the improved spatial resolution and numerical precision of the image sensor. The SPR biosensor presented here has an experimental detection limit of 9.8 × 10(-7) refractive index unit. To validate the system as a biosensor, we also performed the detection of synthetic RNA from pathogenic Legionella pneumophila with the developed biosensing platform.
authors.affiliation: The Photonic Systems Group, Dept. Electrical and Computer Engineering, McGill University, McConnell Engineering Building, Montréal H3A 0E9, Canada.
authors.forename: Sandrine
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Filion-Côté
authors.affiliation: The Photonic Systems Group, Dept. Electrical and Computer Engineering, McGill University, McConnell Engineering Building, Montréal H3A 0E9, Canada.
authors.forename: Philip J R
authors.initials: PJ
authors.lastname: Roche
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Engineering, McGill University, Duff Medical Building, Montréal H3A 2B4, Canada.
authors.forename: Amir M
authors.initials: AM
authors.lastname: Foudeh
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Engineering, McGill University, Duff Medical Building, Montréal H3A 2B4, Canada.
authors.forename: Maryam
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Tabrizian
authors.affiliation: The Photonic Systems Group, Dept. Electrical and Computer Engineering, McGill University, McConnell Engineering Building, Montréal H3A 0E9, Canada.
authors.forename: Andrew G
authors.initials: AG
authors.lastname: Kirk
mesh_terms: D004867:Equipment Design; D013055:Spectrophotometry, Infrared / Q000295:instrumentation*; D020349:Surface Plasmon Resonance / Q000295:instrumentation*