Collection mode surface plasmon fibre sensors: a new biosensing platform

Sensors based on surface plasmon resonance (SPR) allow rapid, label-free, highly sensitive detection, and indeed this phenomenon underpins the only label-free optical biosensing technology that is available commercially. In these sensors, the existence of surface plasmons is inferred indirectly from absorption features that correspond to the coupling of light into a thin metallic film. Although SPR is not intrinsically a radiative process, when the metallic coating which support the plasmonic wave exhibits a significant surface roughness, the surface plasmon can itself couple to the local photon states, and emit light. Here we show that using silver coated optical fibres, this novel SPR transducing mechanism offers significant advantages compare to traditional reflectance based measurements such as lower dependency on the metallic thickness and higher signal to noise ratio. Furthermore, we show that more complex sensor architectures with multiple sensing regions scattered along a single optical fibre enable multiplexed detection and dynamic self referencing of the sensing signal. Moreover, this alternative approach allows to combine two different sensing technologies, SPR and fluorescence sensing within the same device, which has never been demonstrated previously. As a preliminary proof of concept of potential application, this approach has been used to demonstrate the detection of the seasonal influenza A virus.