Design of Surface Plasmon Resonance Sensor with Bruggeman Effective Medium Layers

This paper proposes a specific sensor-design strategy and the possibility of improving the sensing performance, which can be obtained by replacing part of the existing plasmonic sensor based on the Kretschmann configuration method with an effective refractive-index layer. By replacing the metal layer with an effective refractive-index layer composed of gold and the material to be sensed, an improvement in the detection performance, accompanied by an increase in the sensed incident angle, is observed, and the gold-composition ratio that demonstrates the best result is presented. Subsequently, an increase in the sensed incident angle generated in the previous step can be suppressed by randomly etching a portion of the prism adjacent to the metal layer in a sub-wavelength scale. Finally, this study analyzes the optimization of the metal-layer thickness in a given sensor structure. An effective refractive thin-film surface plasmon resonance sensor design that can achieve optimal sensing performance is then proposed.