Patterning metallic films to enhance plasmonic modes for mRNA detection

We pattern a metal film into different nanostructures to investigate the influence of surface plasmonic modes and the effects on the sensitivity to the change of environment's refractive indexes. We find out that 1-D nanoslit array structures and grating structures have much higher sensitivity than 2-D nanoisland array structures and nanowindow array structures when detect the molecules with moderate dimensions such as PLK1 mRNA.