Plasmon-Enhanced Second Harmonic Sensing

It has been recently suggested that the nonlinear optical processes in plasmonic nanoantennas allow for a substantial boost in the sensitivity of plasmonic sensing platforms. Here, we present a sensing device based on an array of non-centrosymmetric plasmonic nanoantennas featuring enhanced second harmonic generation (SHG) integrated in a microfluidic chip. We evaluate its sensitivity both in the linear and nonlinear regime using a figure of merit (FOM=I/In) that accounts for the relative change in the measured intensity, I, against the variation of the environmental refractive index n. While the signal-to-noise ratio achieved in both regimes allows attaining a resolution (i.e., minimum detectable refractive index variation) nmin-10-3, the platform operation in the nonlinear regime features a sensitivity (i.e., the FOM) that is at least 3 times higher than the linear one. Thanks to the surface sensitivity of plasmon-enhanced SHG, our results show that the development of such SHG sensing platforms with sensitivity performances exceeding those of their linear counterparts is within reach.