All-Optical Tunable Plasmonic Biosensor Made of Graphene and Metamaterial

Abstract We demonstrate a novel, label-free and real-time tunable infrared biosensor by employing surface-plasmon polaritons in asymmetric Mach-Zehnder interferometer. The waveguides cladding in the Mach-Zehnder interferometer is made of lossy media with positive and negative electromagnetic susceptibilities, including metamaterial, metal and graphene. The core consists of dielectric media. We introduce two configurations for our biosensor structure. First configuration is an open-path structure and the second one consists of a sample housing made of a silicon layer around the structure. We also present a tunable biosensor by applying a gate voltage to the graphene in the structure. We employ three different cancerous cells, including cervical, breast and basal, as samples to examine the capabilities of the biosensor. Our biosensor structure is highly sensitive, compared to the existing biosensors in the literature, with the sensitivity for basal cancer cell of 1034THz/RIU. The proposed biosensor structure is compact and easy to fabricate with applications in biomedical sensing and environmental control to detect water pollutants.