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Resonant metasurfaces for spectroscopic detection: Physics and biomedical applications - EurekAlert

Optical sensing technologies provide fast and robust methods for detecting, differentiating and quantifying targets from a variety of samples and even probing their molecular structure. Spectroscopic detection technologies have been widely used in the field of optical sensing to explore and analyze the interactions between microscopic matter and electromagnetic radiation/waves, with the core capability of detecting and even decoding the spectral response to external environmental stimuli. Although traditional biomedical analysis and diagnostic methods are still dominant in laboratories with large sample sizes and no need for real-time response to analysis results today, the development of biosensors with non-destructive, real-time, miniaturized, and low-cost features is particularly important with the future development of personalized and precision medical services, which will drastically change the current status quo of disease prevention and diagnosis. With the continuous development of related cutting-edge applications, superstructured surfaces, as an ultrathin and ultralight artificial planar electromagnetic material composed of a large number of periodically aligned subwavelength metallic/dielectric structures (i.e., superatoms), with the ability to control light in a subwavelength volume and to enhance the interaction between light and matter, have opened up new opportunities for nano-optical biomedical sensing. In recent years, researchers have developed a variety of superstructured surface-based spectroscopic detection devices, which, through the careful design of the structure and arrangement of the superatoms as well as the integrated functional materials, have realized the arbitrary tuning of the electromagnetic response of the devices from microwave to visible and even ultraviolet wavelengths, which is of great significance for enhancing the sensing detection of target analytes with geometrical dimensions much smaller than the operating wavelength, and for realizing high-performance It also opens up a new direction for the development of high performance optical sensing technology.

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