Sub-micron resolution surface plasmon resonance imaging enabled by nanohole arrays with surrounding Bragg mirrors for enhanced sensitivity and isolation

Abstract

We present nanohole arrays in thin gold films as sub-micron resolution surface plasmon resonance (SPR) imaging pixels in a microarray format. With SPR imaging, the resolution is not limited by diffraction, but by the propagation of surface plasmon waves to adjacent sensing areas, or nanohole arrays, causing unwanted interference. For ultimate scalability, several issues need to be addressed, including: (1) as several nanohole arrays are brought close to each other, surface plasmon interference introduces large sources of error; and (2) as the size of the nanohole array is reduced, i.e. fewer holes, detection sensitivity suffers. To address these scalability issues, we surround each biosensing pixel (a 3-by-3 nanohole array) with plasmonic Bragg mirrors, blocking interference between adjacent SPR sensing pixels for high-density packing, while maintaining the sensitivity of a 50× larger footprint pixel (a 16-by-16 nanohole array). We measure real-time, label-free streptavidin–biotin binding kinetics with a microarray of 600 sub-micron biosensing pixels at a packing density of more than 10⁷ per cm².