Tracking Single Particles using Surface Plasmon Leakage Radiation Speckle

Abstract

Label free tracking of small bio-particles such as proteins or viruses is of great utility in the study of biological processes, however such experiments are frequently hindered by weak signal strengths and a susceptibility to scattering impurities. To overcome these problems we here propose a novel technique leveraging the enhanced sensitivity of both interferometric detection and the strong field confinement of surface plasmons. Specifically, we show that interference between the field scattered by an analyte particle and a speckle reference field, derived from random scattering of surface plasmons propagating on a rough metal film, enables particle tracking with sub-wavelength accuracy. We present the analytic framework of our technique and verify its robustness to noise through Monte Carlo simulations.

Journal of Lightwave Technology

References in corpus (1)

• Field Correlations in Surface Plasmon Speckle

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Label-free detection of single nanoparticles with disordered nanoisland surface plasmon sensor
• Quantifying the Sensitivity and Unclonability of Optical Physical Unclonable Functions
• Theory of Multiple Scattering Enhanced Single Particle Plasmonic Sensing
• Symmetry constraints for vector scattering and transfer matrices containing evanescent components: energy conservation, reciprocity and time reversal
• Role of Multiple Scattering in Single Particle Perturbations in Absorbing Random Media