Evanescent resonator

Fig. 2 Schematics illustrating various TIRF-based sensing platforms, (a) The NRL Array Biosensor, modified from [28]. (b) The AWACSS platform, modified from [29]. (c) The Evanescent Resonator (ER) platform modified from [13]...

Neuschafer D, Budach W, Wanke C et al (2003) Evanescent resonator chips a universal platform with superior sensitivity for fluorescence-based microarrays. Biosens Bioelectron... 

In these sensors, the intrinsic absorption of the analyte is measured directly. No indicator chemistry is involved. Thus, it is more a kind of remote spectroscopy, except that the instrument comes to the sample (rather than the sample to the instrument or cuvette). Numerous geometries have been designed for plain fiber chemical sensors, all kinds of spectroscopies (from IR to mid-IR and visible to the UV from Raman to light scatter, and from fluorescence and phosphorescence intensity to the respective decay times) have been exploited, and more sophisticated methods including evanescent wave spectroscopy and surface plasmon resonance have been applied. 

In addition, typical methods of sensing are total internal reflection fluorescence or monitoring of fluorescence resonance energy transfer6,7. The second class is a direct optical detection principle which relies either on reflectometry or refractometry. The latter is connected to evanescent field... 

Figure 2. Regular reflectance Replication of Snellius law for reflected and refracted radiation at interface in dependence on the refractive indices of the media adjacent to this interface, demonstrating total internal reflectance and evanescent field, exciting fluorophores close to the waveguide or even surface plasmon resonance.

Fig. 10. A SPR Detection realized in a BIAcore system. A fan of polarized light passes a prism and is focused at the interface to an aqueous phase under conditions of total reflection. An evanescent wave enters the solvent phase. If the prism is coated with a thin gold layer at the interface the free electrons in the metal absorb energy from the evanescent wave for a distinct angle, depending on the refractive index of the solvent near the interface. B The gold layer can be modified with, e.g., a carboxydextrane matrix, where catcher molecules can be immobilized by standard chemistry. If a ligand is applied with the aqueous phase it may interact with the catcher and accumulate in the matrix, causing a shift in the resonance angle. If no specific binding occurs the refractive index in proximity of the sensor is less affected...

The same observations are true for the evanescent wave of the modes in the surrounding medium. Moreover, these changes in the field distributions are accompanied by an increase of the effective refractive indices of the cladding modes, as will be clarified later. For this reason and by virtue of (3.1), the resonance wavelengths of the coated LPG are expected to blue-shift in response to an overlay thickness change. 

Let the effective loss coefficient now include, in addition to intrinsic loss, a contribution due to absorption (and scattering) by the analyte contained in the evanescent fraction/of the WGM y = yx +/xa. The effect of the analyte on the resonant (single-frequency) drop signal D0a, when analyte absorption is a small fraction of the total loss, can be written in terms of an approximate effective absorption path length Leff as defined below ... 

So far, in label-free chemical sensing applications, the interaction of a WGM s evanescent component with an analyte in the ambient or adsorbed on the microresonator s surface has led to the development of two sensing methods. These are monitoring of the WGM resonance frequency shift due to the analyte s change of... 

Blair, S. Chen, Y., Resonant enhanced evanescent wave fluorescence biosensing with cylin drical optical cavities, Appl. Opt. 2001, 40, 570 582... 

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