Bovine serum albumin detection based on electromagnetically induced transparency in terahertz metamaterial

In this study, a new type of sensor based on electromagnetically induced transparency metamaterials is designed and theoretically analyzed in detail. The proposed metamaterial sensor consisted of a polyimide substrate at the bottom and a periodic aluminum structure on the top. CST STUDIO SUITE was used to determine the trans-mission spectrum of the metamaterials in the terahertz band using finite integration. The simulation results show that the sensitivity of the metamaterial sensor reaches 270.4 GHz/RIU. The metamaterial sensor was then fabricated to detect bovine serum albumin with a sensitivity of 15.390 GHz/(mg/mL) and a limit of detection (LOD) of 8.97 & mu;g/mL in the concentration range of 0-10 mg/mL. The proposed sensor has the advantages of incident-angle insensitivity, polarization insensitivity, and small size; thus, it has many potential applications in various research fields, including physics, biology, and chemical sensing.