Power-flow-based design strategy for Bloch surface wave biosensors.

ABSTRACT

We propose a novel semi-analytic design strategy for dielectric one-dimensional multilayer biosensors that is based on a relation between the angular sensitivity and the optical power flow of the Bloch surface wave guided by the multilayer. We show that our strategy can be used to optimize both the sensor's sensitivity and figure-of-merit without the need for extensive numerical parameter sweeps.