Highly sensitive short-range mode resonance sensor with multilayer structured hyperbolic metamaterials

Abstract

Hyperbolic metamaterial (HMM) based sensors can achieve superior sensing performance than conventional surface plasmon resonance sensors. In this work, the operator approach to effective medium approximation (OEMA) is used to characterize the HMM dielectric constant properties of metal-dielectric multilayer structures, which are classified into short-range (SR) mode and long-range (LR) mode according to the propagation length of the bulk high K waves in HMM. The dispersion relations of SR modes are derived, and a high-sensitivity refractive index sensor is designed for the near-infrared SR mode resonance. The effects of the number of periods, cell thickness, metal fill rate and incidence angle on the SR mode resonance were analyzed for the multilayer structured HMM. Our designed sensing structure achieves a maximum sensitivity of 330 µm/RIU in the near-infrared band with a quality factor of 492 RIU-1. In addition, the simulations show that the SR mode resonance wavelength is flexible and tunable. We believe that the study of HMM-based SR mode resonance sensors offers potential applications for high-sensitivity biochemical detection.