Figure of merit enhancement of surface plasmon resonance biosensor based on Talbot effect

This paper reports the numerical investigation of the Talbot effect for biomaterial detection at optical frequencies. Cytop polymer grating Plasmonics structure with periodicity comparable to the incident wavelength are applied to evaluate of the plasmonics Talbot biosensor. Significant sensitivity from the proposed Talbot biosensor is obtained. For this purpose, the effect of the different biomaterials including Ether, Ethyleneglycol, Chlorobenzene and Quinoline on plasmonics Talbot effects at wavelength range of 550-650 nm are then inspected to improve the structural parameters of the biosensor. Also, the sensitivity and figure-of-merit are calculated. Our numerical results show that the proposed biosensor are able to operate as a high sensitivity with maximum FOM of 20.99, and sensitivity of 324 nm/refractive index unit for small change of $$\Delta n$$ = 0.4, in the refractive index of biomaterials. We believe that the proposed biosensor can be applied as a label free on-chip biosensor.