New Nanopores for Combined Plasmonic and Electrical Sensing

Licentiate thesis, 2016

In this thesis, several kinds of artificial plasmonic biosensors are introduced. They have different nanostructures which are nanoholes, nanowells and nanopores. The fabrication technologies are introduced. All these nanostructures are fabricated based on colloidal lithography technology and following by several special steps. Different kinds of nanostructures can be used for different purposes, nanoholes is one of the simplest biosensors, which can be used to detect one kind of targets. Nanowells has different plasmonic signals for different binding positions. Nanopores can act not only as a biosensor but also nanofluidics. All these plasmonic biosensors have plasmonic signals, which provide the information for sensing. Depending on observing the shifts of the peak and the dip for plasmonic signal, the reaction between the targets and the receptors on the sensor surface can be detected. The theoretical analyzing and mathematic functions of plasmonic signals are introduced. For different nanostructures, the plasmonic signals are also different. Even for the same kind of nanostructures, the position of the peak and the dip are also influenced by the periodicity, the diameters of the nanostructures and the thickness of metal layer. The plasmonic biosensors could have lots of additional applications after combing other technologies, the plasmonic thermal sensor is one of them. This special sensor is produced by implementing the electrical technology on nanoholes sample. After applying electronic currents, the nanoholes sample can produce thermal energy, meanwhile, it can also provide plasmonic signals. By calculation the resistance of the metal film, the temperature can be gotten, so the plasmonic biosensor can be used to heat targets with specific temperature and also observe the surface condition of the biosensor based on the variation of the plasmonic signal.