Singular-phase nanooptics: towards label-free single molecule detection

Abstract

Non-trivial topology of phase is crucial for many important physics phenomena such as, for example, the Aharonov-Bohm effect 1 and the Berry phase 2. Light phase allows one to create "twisted" photons 3, 4 , vortex knots 5, dislocations 6 which has led to an emerging field of singular optics relying on abrupt phase changes 7. Here we demonstrate the feasibility of singular visible-light nanooptics which exploits the benefits of both plasmonic field enhancement and non-trivial topology of light phase. We show that properly designed plasmonic nanomaterials exhibit topologically protected singular phase behaviour which can be employed to radically improve sensitivity of detectors based on plasmon resonances. By using reversible hydrogenation of graphene 8 and a streptavidin-biotin test 9, we demonstrate areal mass sensitivity at a level of femto-grams per mm2 and detection of individual biomolecules, respectively. Our proof-of-concept results offer a way towards simple and scalable single-molecular label-free biosensing technologies.

19 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (2)

• Control of graphene's properties by reversible hydrogenation
• Divergence of Dipole Sums and the Nature of Non-Lorentzian Exponentially Narrow Resonances in One-Dimensional Periodic Arrays of Nanospheres

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Graphene-protected copper and silver plasmonics
• Topological engineering of interfacial optical Tamm states for highly-sensitive near-singular-phase optical detection
• Plasmon losses due to electron-phonon scattering: the case of graphene encapsulated in hexagonal Boron Nitride
• Nonlinearity in the Dark: Broadband Terahertz Generation with Extremely High Efficiency
• Enhanced Reflectivity Change and Phase Shift of Polarized Light: Double Parameter Multilayer Sensor