Quantitative Cross-Platform Performance Comparison between Different Detection Mechanisms in Surface Plasmon Sensors for Voltage Sensing

Surface plasmon Resonance (SPR) has recently been of interest for label-free voltage sensing. Several SPR structures have been proposed. However, making a quantitative cross-platform comparison for these structures is not straightforward due to (1) different SPR measurement mechanisms; (2) different electrolytic solution and concentration in the measurement; and (3) different levels of external applied potential. Here, we propose a quantitative approach to make a direct quantitative comparison across different SPR structures, different electrolytic solutions and different SPR measurement mechanisms. There are two structures employed as example in this theoretical study including uniform plasmonic gold sensor and bimetallic layered structure consisting of uniform silver layer (Ag) coated by uniform gold layer (Ag). The cross-platform comparison was carried by several performance parameters including sensitivity (S), full width half maximum (FWHM) and figure of merit (FoM). We also discuss how the SPR measurement mechanisms enhance the performance parameters and how the bimetallic layer can be employed to enhance the FoM by a factor of 1.34 to 25 depending on the SPR detection mechanism.