Real-time detection of small and large molecules using a porous silicon grating-coupled Bloch surface wave label-free biosensor

摘要

A grating coupled porous silicon (pSi) Bloch Surface Wave (BSW) biosensor capable of supporting a surface mode is demonstrated for the real-time detection of both small and large molecules. In contrast to most pSi based sensor platforms that are unable to perform high sensitivity detection of large molecules that do not infiltrate into the porous matrix, the pSi BSW sensor has more than 15% of the field intensity confined to the surface of the structure, allowing for high sensitivity detection of surface-bound large molecules. Angular interrogated reflectance measurements were carried out to benchmark the performance of the pSi BSW against two common pSi sensor platforms, the waveguide and microcavity, after exposing each sensor to two different small molecules and one large molecule in a flow-cell environment. All of the sensors showed comparable sensitivity towards the detection of the small molecules, but the BSW sensor was clearly superior for detection of the large molecules. The experimental results were found to be in good agreement with simulations based on rigorous coupled wave analysis and the transfer matrix method.