High Figure of Merit SPR Sensor Based on Raspberry-Like Silica

To address the problems that the surface plasmon resonance (SPR) sensor is not sensitive enough to detect biomolecules in the refractive index range (RI
$=1.33$
–1.34) and the traditional methods to enhance the sensitivity cause the sensor poor bioaffinity, this article proposed a raspberry-like silica-assisted high figure of merit (FOM) fiber-optic SPR sensor. The finite element method results show that when the raspberry-like silica is introduced to the SPR sensor, the resonant electric field intensity on the sensor surface is 2.97 times stronger than that of SPR sensors only. Raspberry-like silica particles composed of different noble metal nanoparticles (AuNPs, PtNPs, and CuNPs) were prepared to compare and analyze the effects of different nanoparticles on the sensing performance. The sensing experiments showed that AuNPs raspberry-like silica had the most excellent performance, enabling the sensor to achieve high sensitivity of 5264.3 nm/RIU, which is 2.65 times higher than the Au film SPR sensor. The fitting calculations showed that the AuNPs raspberry-like silica-assisted SPR sensor had a high FOM of 42.9 RIU
$^{-1}$
, 1.9 times more than the Au film SPR sensor. In addition, the sensor has good temperature stability, repeatability, and generality after the corresponding test. The proposed raspberry-like structure provides a new approach to obtain both high sensitivity and high FOM for the SPR sensor, which makes the sensor potential for biosensing.