ABSTRACT

OPTICAL FIBER BIOSENSOR BASED ON SURFACE

PLASMON RESONANCE: MODELING, FABRICATION, AND
CHARACTERIZATION
By
Nina Siti Aminah
NIM: 30212007

Biosensor based-on surface plasmon resonance (SPR) using polychromatic light

coupling was developed to investigate the change in refractive index which occur
as a result of chemical or biochemical processes. The study begins by studying the
traditional SPR sensor using a prism to observe the reflectance spectrum at each
variation of the angle of light. The thin film layers of gold deposited using a
sputtering method to excite the surface plasmon mode (SP). At certain angles,
resonance occurs, the tangential component of the wave vector comes together
with real part wave vector surface plasmon waves are generated by evanescent
that propagate along the boundary of metal-dielectric and decays exponentially in
the normal direction of the boundary of metal-dielectric, thereby reducing the
intensity of the reflectance and produce dip.

After that this dissertation discusses the fabrication and characterization of optical
fiber-based SPR biosensor with taper structure. Starting from how to obtain the
structure of SPR to characterize the various solutions with a refractive index that
is different. Simulation also investigate in this thesis.

There is a significant need for the development and use of numerical methods to
simulate advance and complex optical biosensor structures. Finite Element
Method (FEM) has been established as one of the most powerful and versatile
numerical method and has been implemented in this thesis to characterize, analyse
and optimise label-free optical biosensors for the detection of micron size
biological objects like bacteria such as E.coli and nanometre size biomolecules
such as antibody, nucleic acids and proteins. These sensors are all suitable for
deep-probe sensing as large evanescent field can be excited in the sensing medium
with substantial penetration depth achieved by techniques like Surface Plasmon
Resonance (SPR) and sensor architectures based on nanowires and slot
waveguides.

This thesis presents three different architectures of label-free optical biosensors.

First, a fiber optic surface plasmon resonance (SPR) biosensor for the detection of
DNA hybridization is optically modeled by using the finite-element approach in
conjunction with the perturbation technique which is computationally more
efficient and can be used for waveguides with low or medium loss values. The
same sensing architecture is used when surrounding index is varied from 1.456-
1.53 to cover most of the biological elements that are used in the biosensing

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applications. It is found that all of the numerical methods provide good agreement
with the experimental sensitivities and detection limits.

Keyword: surface plasmon resonance, fiber optic, finite element method, tapered
structure, DNA hybridization