Numerical study of nanoscale biosensor based on surface plasmon polariton propagation in Mach-Zehnder interferometer structure

In this paper, we numerically investigate a nanoscale plasmonic biosensor based on Mach-Zehnder interferometry. The operation of Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) biosensor is examined based on two methods. In the first method, in which the transmission of surface plasmon polariton (SPP) modes is investigated under different refractive indices of sample medium as well as different dimensions, the best transmission rate achieved about 56.6% which is resulted by refractive index variation about 0.045 for the length 12 mu m and width 80 nm of the gold layer. Also, the sensitivity, figure of merit (FOM) and quality factor (Q-factor) of MZI are examined for different geometries by utilizing the alternative method. It is realized that for the constant length, increasing the thickness of gold layer has significantly led to increased Q-factor and FOM. On the other hand, considering fixed thickness of the Au layer and three different lengths, the major outcome is that as the length of biosensor increases, the sensitivity, Q-factor as well as FOM follow an upward trend. Finally, inserting two distinct additional gold layers on top of the main gold layer, resulted in an extreme increase for the sensitivity and FOM of the plasmonic MZI biosensors with respect to the MZI biosensor without additional layer.