Plasmonic Sensors based on 3D-printed polymer waveguides covered by a metals bilayer

The design, development, and testing of a 3D-printed plasmonic sensor has been here presented. A silver and gold bilayer has been deposited on a polymer waveguide to improve the performance of the surface plasmon resonance (SPR) sensor. The developed SPR sensor is very simple to realize, small-size, low-cost, and its sensitivity is sufficient to realize biosensors, exploiting specific receptors in contact with the sensing bilayer. Therefore, the proposed sensing approach could be used to make disposable sensor chips for several application fields, e.g. point-of-care tests and environmental monitoring. Furthermore, numerical and experimental results have demonstrated that the sensor's sensitivity improves when the proposed metals bilayer is used instead of a gold layer.