Nanophotonics and Optics Biosensors

Dear colleagues,

Nanophotonics merges nanotechnology with photonics in order to enable the confinement of light into nanoscale optical mode volumes and to enhance light–matter interactions. When electromagnetic radiation is confined into tiny regions, the interaction nature of radiation with matter becomes a topic of great interest from both the fundamental point of view as well as for many optical engineering applications. This radiation confinement, usually accompanied by an extraordinary enhancement of electric field intensity, accounts for many interesting optical phenomena and effects, such as surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS), enhanced optical transmission and enhanced absorption and emission of light, and enables high-resolution microscopy and imaging.

The last decade has experienced a noticeable boost in the development of nanophotonic technologies for biosensing. A wide manifold of nanostructures has been fabricated to enhance analytical sensitivity, specificity and integration capabilities in miniaturized devices that modern optical biosensors offer. While microscopic optical observations can provide useful information, much of the biological interactions occur at the microscale or nanoscale. Thus, nanophotonics is extremely relevant for the development of next-generation biosensor technologies. These technologies should meet the requirements of emerging new healthcare initiatives, including personalized medicine, global health care and point-of-care diagnostics. Therefore, tremendous efforts are invested in Nanophotonics in order to develop powerful biosensors for early disease diagnostics, personalized medicine, environmental and food monitoring and safety.

In this Special Issue titled “Nanophotonics and Optical Biosensors,” we present a collection of articles that highlight the progress in using nanophotnics for optical biosensing. We aim to cover a wide range of perspectives, from fundamental aspects of the sensor to diverse applicative configurations such as interferometric waveguides, grating-couplers, microcavity resonators, photonic crystal and localized surface plasmon resonance sensors. In addition to the recent applications of these configurations in different fields, these articles present the advantages and challenges of nanophotonic structures for optical biosensing and imaging.

Dr. Atef Shalabney
Guest Editor

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• nanophotonics
• optical biosensors
• surface plasmon resonance
• rapid analytical methods
• evanescent optical sensing
• imaging, molecular optical detection