Influence of Biomolecule Size on Performance of Nanostructured Sensing Devices

摘要

Porous silicon is an excellent material for biosensing because of its large surface area and ability to filter out large contaminant species. In order to characterize the sensitivity of porous silicon based biosensors for biomolecules of different sizes, a mesoporous silicon waveguide with average pore diameter of 20 nm is used to detect single strand DNA oligos with different numbers of base pairs at different concentrations. Experimental results indicate that 16-mer DNA is detected most sensitively with the mesoporous silicon waveguide.