Applied Nanophotonics, Liquid Crystals and Biomedical Optics

The majority of commercially available surface plasmon resonance (SPR) sensors rely solely on the detection of the intensity minimum of the reflected signal avoiding the extraction of the polarization properties. Such properties, i.e. the phase difference between polarization components and the azimuthal angle of the polarization ellipse, give sharper responses than the intensity which lead to a better measurement accuracy. Therefore, the lack of extraction of polarization properties in such devices significantly limits their performance. In this work we suggest different configurations of multifunctioning SPR sensing systems that can extract both the normalized reflectivity and the polarization properties simultaneously in the angular and spectral modes. This leads to a significant boost in the performance of existing SPR sensors as multi-parametric functioning systems.