Systemic comparison of dielectric and plasmonic biosensors on a silicon photonics platform

Abstract

Plasmonic and dielectric based waveguides are widely used for biosensing applications. However, the use of different sensing architectures and platforms hinders the fair comparison of their respective figures of merit. In this paper, plasmonic and dielectric-based photonic waveguide biosensors are compared in terms of attainable limit of detection, using in both cases a coherent-readout interferometric architecture