Ultrasensitive Sizing Sensor for a Single Nanoparticle in a Hybrid Nonlinear Microcavity

Abstract

We propose a potentially practical scheme for realizing ultrasensitive size sensor of a single metallic nanoparticles (MNP) in a hybrid nonlinear microcavity. This is achieved by exploiting a well-established microcavity-engineered plasmonic resonance, where a degenerate parametric amplifier (DPA) is embedded into the microcavity driven by a strong pump field and a weak probe pulse. It is shown that the transmission spectrum of the probe pulse exihibits a two-peak splitting and the splitting width depends on the radius. The radius of a single MNP can be inferred from the transmission spectrum by monitoring the width between two peaks. Using experimentally achievable parameters, we identify the detection sensitivity of the sensor can reach approximately 0.198 THz/nm for detecting and sizing of individual MNPs as small as 10 nm in radius.

Keywords

• Quantum optics
• optical sensing and sensors
• plasmonics