Dual-channel fiber surface plasmon resonance biological sensor based on a hybrid interrogation of intensity and wavelength modulation

We investigate an intensity and wavelength modulation combined plasmon resonance-based fiberoptic sensor technology. Composed of gold nanoparticles (GNPs) and sandwich configuration of Au/indium tin oxide (ITO)/Au film, two sensing regions are fabricated separately along with unclad portions of the fiber-optic probe. It can simultaneously monitor both the light intensity from the Au NP channel and the wavelength from the Au/ITO/Au film channel with a single detector. As the refractive index (RI) of the external environment changes, the transmission intensity and resonance wavelength in the two channels are modified, which provides an interrogation of intensity and wavelength modulation. The sandwich film structure is formed using magnetron sputtering technology, and the GNPs functioning as localized surface plasmon resonators are coated on a multimode optical fiber via the layer-by-layer method. The experimental results reveal that the RI sensitivities of the two sensing channels are 334.1% RIU-1 and 1963.2 nm/RIU, respectively. Based on the above sensing design, we conduct real-time and label-free monitoring of IgG/anti-IgG and Con A/RNase B biomolecular interaction. The resonant dips excited by different sensing modes make it more attractive as a multichannel surface plasmon resonance analysis technology, which is valuable in biological and life sciences research and rapid diagnostics. (C) 2016 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE).