Integrated Photonic Nanofences: Combining Subwavelength Waveguides with an Enhanced Evanescent Field for Sensing Applications

Photonic nanofences consisting of high aspect ratio polymeric optical subwavelength waveguides done by two-photon polymerization have shown extremely large evanescent field (70-90% of the total coupled light). This concept has been used for implementing an absorbance-based sensor for the determination of lead in water samples, obtaining a sensitivity of 0.102 AU/decade, and a linear range between 10-6 M and 10-2 M Pb(II) and a detection limit of 7.3 nM
ACS Nano, 2016, 10 (1), pp 778–785.