Analysis of one-dimensional photonic crystal-based sensor for detection of

blood plasma and cancer cells

Ashish Bijalwan a, Bipin K. Singh b,*, Vipul Rastogi a a Department of Physics, Indian Institute of
Technology, Roorkee, 247667, India b Department of Physics, University of Mumbai, Mumbai, 400
032, India
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ijleo

The schematic diagrams of the biosensors based on 1-D PC structures;

(a) sensor-I and (b) sensor-II, with defect layer of blood plasma or cancer cell
are shown in Fig. 1. Sensor-I consists of a multilayers structure
air/(AB)nS(AB)n/air as shown in Fig. 1 (a). Sensor- I design is like a
conventional PC based sensor structure. Sensor-II is shown in Fig. 1(b)

Fig. 1. Schematic diagrams of the proposed 1-D photonic crystal based biosensor structures
(a) conversional PC sensor-I; air/(AB)nS(AB)n/air and (b) sensor-II; air/(AB)nCSC(AB)n/air.

This multi-layered structure consisting of air/(AB)nCSC(AB)n/air. Here, n

represents the number of periods.
The media A and B are the layer SiO2 of width d1, refractive index n1, and the
layer TiO2 of width d2, refractive index n2, respectively.
The defect medium S is the sample layer of width ds, and refractive index ns,
and layer C is the additional SiO2 layer of thickness d3, and refractive index n1.
To study the sensing performance of PC based biosensor, we first numerically
analyze the reflection properties of sensor-I. The thickness of SiO2 and TiO2
layers are d1 = 120 nm, d2 = 90 nm respectively, and the wavelength dependent
refractive indices of SiO2 (n1), and TiO2 (n2) have been obtained from
literatures The values of refractive indices n1 and n2 are 1.475 and 2.365 at the
wavelength 700 nm. The reflection spectra of the perfect PC structure (sensor-I
with dS = 0 nm) and a bio-sample filled sensor-I with different values of nS are
shown in Fig. 2.
The optical properties of the blood plasma and cancer cell samples have been
obtained from previously reported papers [15–17,38,39]. The proposed Sensor-I
and Sensor-II can be easily developed to fabricate multilayer structures based on top-
down and bottom-up construction routes using spin-coating, doctor-blade, and dip coating
approach [32,33].