Cancer cell detection by plasmonic dual V-shaped PCF biosensor

Abstract

In this paper, a highly sensitive plasmonic photonic crystal fiber (PCF) biosensor is reported for cancer cell detection. The modal analysis of the reported biosensor is performed using the full vectorial finite element method. The suggested PCF sensor has dual V-shaped groves to enhance the sensor sensitivity where two gold nano-rods are mounted on the etched surfaces. The main idea of the optical sensors is to track the electromagnetic coupling between the leaky core mode and the surface plasmon mode (SPM) at the metal/dielectric interface. When the SPM and one of the fundamental core modes are phase-matched, strong coupling occurs. Therefore, maximum confinement loss is achieved for the core-guided mode at the resonance wavelength, which depends on the analyte refractive index (RI). The V-shaped groove enhances the core/SPM coupling where high RI sensitivity of 24,000 nm/RIU is achieved along the RI range from 1.38 to 1.39, with a resolution of 2.703×10−6RIU. The potential of using the suggested RI sensor for cancer cell detection is then demonstrated. In this context, high sensitivities of 23,700 nm/RIU, 8,208 nm/RIU, and 14,428.6 are obtained for basal, cervical, and breast cancer cells with resolutions of 4.22×10−6RIU, 12.18×10−6RIU, and 6.93×10−6RIU, respectively. The achieved sensitivity and resolution are higher than those of the recently reported cancer biosensors. Moreover, the developed label-free biosensor is safer than other chemical and surgical techniques.