Miniaturized quantum semiconductor surface plasmon resonance platform for detection of biological molecules

The concept of a portable, inexpensive and semi-automated biosensing platform, or lab-on-a-chip, is a vision shared by many researchers and venture industries. Under this scope, we have investigated the application of optical emission from quantum well (QW) microstructures for monitoring surface phenomena on gold layers remaining in proximity (<300 nm) with QW microstructures. The uncollimated QW radiation excites surface plasmons (SP) and through the surface plasmon resonance (SPR) effect allows for detection of small perturbation in the density surface adsorbates. The SPR technology is already commonly used for biochemical characterization in pharmaceutical industries, but the reduction of the distance between the SP exciting source and the biosensing platform to a few hundreds of nanometers is an innovative approach enabling us to achieve an ultimate miniaturization of the device. We evaluate the signal quality of this nanophotonic QW-SPR device using hyperspectral-imaging technology, and we compare its performance with that of a standard prism-based commercial system. Two standard biochemical agents are employed for this characterization study: bovine serum albumin and inactivated influenza A virus. With an innovative conical method of SPR data collection, we demonstrate that individually collected SPR scan, each in less than 2.2 s, yield a resolution of the detection at 1.5 × 10-6 RIU.