Application of Few-Layer Transition Metal Dichalcogenides to Detect the Refractive Index Variation in Lossy-Mode Resonance Sensors With High Figure of Merit

A lossy-mode resonance (LMR) refractive index (RI) sensor with a few layer transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) is proposed. Contrasting with traditional surface plasmon resonance (SPR) sensors, the LMR sensor can support both transverse magnetic (TM) and transverse electric (TE) polarizations, while the traditional SPR sensors can only operate for TM polarization. Through theoretical calculation and simulation, we find that the proposed LMR sensor can realize higher sensitive and narrower full width half maximum (FWHM), and the most attractive character is figure-of-merit (FOM) with 1582 RIU
^-1
, which is a significant improvement compared to the existing LMR sensors and is even 40% higher than the best graphene-based SPR sensors. We trust that the proposed LMR sensor can be extensively applied in optical sensing technology, chemical biomolecular detection, and so on.