Nanoplasmonic optical biosensors

表面等离子体共振传感允许检测非常低浓度的各种不同的感兴趣的分子种类。它在许多领域都有重要的应用。一个例子是医疗诊断，它可以用来感知蛋白质的存在，这些蛋白质可以在其他症状出现之前表明病人有疾病，从而实现早期治疗。在药物筛选中，它可用于快速识别候选化合物（因此对加拿大制药工业具有重要价值），在环境传感中，它可用于检测公共供水中的病原体。为了提高表面等离子体共振传感的灵敏度、专一性和实用性，我们提出了一个研究方案。为了做到这一点，我们将利用周期性光学纳米结构来增加传感器表面的电磁场强度，从而提高灵敏度。我们将把孤立纳米结构分析的最新进展与我们自己对周期性纳米结构的研究结合起来，以获得两者的最大利益。我们还将结合量子点以增加特异性（即更少的假阳性检测），并将研究使传感系统更好地集成和降低成本的技术。该项目将为4名博士生和3名硕士生提供多学科的培训，他们将在电磁建模、微纳米制造、仪器仪表、生物化学和生物医学工程方面获得专业知识。

Surface plasmon resonance sensing allows the detection of very low concentrations of a wide range of different molecular species of interest. It has important application in many fields. One example is medical diagnostics where it can be used to sense the presence of proteins that indicate that the patient has a medical condition well in advance of other symptoms being visible and thus enabling early treatment. In drug screening it can be used to rapidly identify candidate compounds (and so is of great value to the Canadian pharmaceutical industry) and in environmental sensing it may be used to detect pathogens in the public water supply. Here we propose a research program which will improve the sensitivity, specificity and practicality of surface plasmon resonance sensing. To do this we will make use of periodic optical nanostructures in order to increase the intensity of the electromagnetic fields at the surface of the sensor and hence increase sensitivity. We will combine recent advances in the analysis of isolated nanostructures with our own research into periodic nanostructures in order to obtain the maximum benefits of both. We will also incorporate quantum dots in order to increase specificity (i.e. fewer false-positive detections) and will investigate techniques to make the sensing systems better integrated and lower cost. This program will provide training for 4 PhD students and 3 Masters students in a multidisciplinary environment in which they will gain expertise in electromagnetic modeling, micro- and nanofabrication, instrumentation, biochemistry and biomedical engineering.