Tamm Plasmon Polariton Biosensors Based on Porous Silicon: Design, Validation and Analysis

Tamm Plasmon Polariton (TPP) is a nanophotonic phenomenon that has attracted much attention due to its spatial strong field confinement, ease of mode excitation, and polarization independence. TPP has applications in sensing, storage, lasing, perfect absorber, solar cell, nonlinear optics, and many others. In this work, we demonstrate a biosensing platform based on TPP resonant mode. Both theoretical analyses based on the transfer matrix method and experimental validation through nonspecific detection of liquids of different refractive indices and specific detection of SARS-CoV-2 nucleocapsid protein (N-protein) are presented. Results show that the TPP biosensor has high sensitivity and good specificity. For N-protein detection, the sensitivity can be up to 1.5 nm/(µg/mL), and the limit of detection can reach down to 7 ng/mL with a spectrometer of 0.01 nm resolution in wavelength shift. Both nonspecific detection of R.I. liquids and specific detection of N-protein have been simulated and compared with experimental results to demonstrate consistency. This work paves the way for design, optimization, fabrication, characterization, and performance analysis of TPP based biosensors.