Application Of Phase Measurement To Surface Plasmon Resonance Sensors

Surface plasmon resonance (SPR) sensors are new kinds of sensors with the advantages of simple structure and high sensitivity. They have the non-invasive nature and the capability of real-time monitoring and have recently attracted many attentions in the field of sensoring. SPR sensoring technologies have been widely used in various fields such as biology, medicine, chemistry, and so on. More and more researchers devote themselves to the studies of SPR technology and its applications.The article mainly concentrates on the study of SPR sensor with the phase detection method and its experimental implementing technique, the aim is to further improve the detection sensitivity of SPR sensor. The work has been done consists of four parts. Firstly, we review the current status and trends of the researches in SPR sensors and give the features and limitations of different schemes of SPR sensors. Secondly, on the basis of electromagnetic theory, we have described the characteristics of surface plasmon wave and its exciting configuration. In the third part, we numerically simulate the different excitation layer model by adopting Kretschmann type excitation. The effects of various experimental conditions on the SPR excitation have been discussed. In the last part, we have discussed the phase detection technique, the phase extraction process usually involves first capturing a set of interference fringes, then followed by converting the movement of the fringes into a phase quantity. we present a experimental setup which use a common optical path to generates the interference fringes, and use a CCD camera to capture the interference fringes. With the help of program, then the phase change can be extracted. We have experimentally performed the measurements of phases, the experimental data and the analyses have been given.