Quasiperiodic nanohole arrays on optical fibers as plasmonic sensors: fabrication and sensitivity determination

Surface plasmon resonance enhanced optical transmission has been observed in periodic nanohole arrays and plenty of plasmonic applications from label-free biosensing to surface-enhanced spectroscopies on various platforms have been found. Recently this effect has also been demonstrated for nanohole arrays with quasiperiodic patterns such as the Penrose tiling. Here we pattern and transfer quasiperiodic nanohole arrays onto optical fibers and investigate their optical performance in refractive index sensing. These quasiperiodic arrays show multiple resonances closely related to their geometric features. The resonances are narrow and sensitive to the dielectric changes on the probe surface due to our high quality fabrication. We find the measured sensitivity of our quasiperiodic nanohole arrays is as high as that of periodic nanohole arrays and reaches the theoretical sensitivity limit as predicted by our universal sensitivity analysis. This result in turn verifies our sensitivity theory on propagating surface plasmon resonance in a wider range beyond periodic nanostructure arrays. Our study demonstrates the quasiperiodic nanohole array based optical fiber is a high-performance plasmonic sensor.Peipei Jia, Zhaoliang Yang, Jun Yang, and Heike Ebendorff-Heideprie