Sensitivity enhanced tunable plasmonic biosensor using two-dimensional twisted bilayer graphene superlattice

• Published in: Nanophotonics (Berlin, Germany) Vol. 12; no. 7; pp. 1271 - 1284
• Main Authors: Du, Fusheng, Zheng, Kai, Zeng, Shuwen, Yuan, Yufeng
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Germany De Gruyter 01.04.2023; Walter de Gruyter GmbH
• Subjects: Bilayers; Biomedical materials; Biomolecules; Biosensors; Configurations; Engineering Sciences; GH shift; Graphene; Hemoglobin; human hemoglobin; Microorganisms; Optics; Photonic; Plasmonics; Refractivity; SARS-CoV-2; Sensitivity enhancement; Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2; Superlattices; Thin films; tunable plasmonic biosensor; twisted bilayer graphene superlattice; twisted bilayer graphene superlattice; SARS-CoV-2; human hemoglobin; tunable plasmonic biosensor; GH shift; sensitivity enhancement
• ISSN: 2192-8614; 2192-8606; 2192-8614
• DOI: 10.1515/nanoph-2022-0798

This study theoretically demonstrated an insight for designing a novel tunable plasmonic biosensor, which was created by simply stacking a twisted bilayer graphene (TBG) superlattice onto a plasmonic gold thin film. To achieve ultrasensitive biosensing, the plasmonic biosensor was modulated by Goos–Hänchen (GH) shift. Interestingly, our proposed biosensor exhibited tunable biosensing ability, largely depending on the twisted angle. When the relative twisted angle was optimized to be 55.3°, such a configuration: 44 nm Au film/1-TBG superlattice could produce an ultralow reflectivity of 2.2038 × 10 and ultra-large GH shift of 4.4785 × 10 µm. For a small refractive index (RI) increment of 0.0012 RIU (refractive index unit) in sensing interface, the optimal configuration could offer an ultra-high GH shift detection sensitivity of 3.9570 × 10 µm/RIU. More importantly, the optimal plasmonic configuration demonstrated a theoretical possibility of quantitatively monitoring severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) and human hemoglobin. Considering an extremely small RI change as little as 3 × 10 RIU, a good linear response between detection concentration of SARS-CoV-2 and changes in differential GH shift was studied. For SARS-CoV-2, a linear detection interval was obtained from 0 to 2 nM. For human hemoglobin, a linear detection range was achieved from 0 to 0.002 g/L. Our work will be important to develop novel TBG-enhanced biosensors for quantitatively detecting microorganisms and biomolecules in biomedical application.