All-dielectric metasurfaces with high Q-factor Fano resonances enabling multi-scenario sensing

Abstract

We propose and numerically demonstrate high Q-factor sensors based on all-dielectric metasurfaces, which are very sensitive to the change of the refractive index of the surrounding media and the incident angle. By using the light incident angular scanning method, the all-dielectric metasurface based on symmetric tetramer can act as an excellent sensing platform for trace-amount molecules such as protein A/G, 2, 4-DNT, and 2D material graphene with huge absorbance enhancement in the mid-infrared broadband spectrums. The results reveal that envelope of absorbance amplitudes is in good agreement with the vibrational mode of molecules, and absorbance enhancement factors reach as high as 10 dB in the mid-infrared wavelength range from 5.75 to 6.80 μm. To further increase the Q-factor of the resonances, the all-dielectric metasurface based on asymmetric tetramer is investigated. This asymmetric structure can induce toroidal and magnetic dipoles governed by quasi-BIC to produce multi-extremely narrow linewidth Fano resonances, and the maximum sensitivity reaches up to 1.43 μm/RIU. Therefore, the proposed all-dielectric metasurface demonstrates highly enhanced performance in refractive index and chemical information sensing for trace-amount biomolecules, which inspires the development of new high-sensitivity refractive index sensors for the nondestructive identification in the mid-infrared regime.

Keywords

• all-dielectric metasurface
• bound states in the continuum (bic)
• sensing