Optical chemical barcoding based on polarization controlled plasmonic nanopixels

Plasmonic devices offer the possibility of passively detecting changes in local chemistry that opens up a wide range of applications from molecular sensing to monitoring water quality. Conventional plasmonics have previously shown great promise as nanoscale chemical sensors through detection of small variations in the local refractive index (RI). The motivation behind using plasmonics for these applications includes the fact that detection is entirely passive and the devices themselves can be readily miniaturized. Previously, a lack of any control over the output of these devices, has fundamentally limited their application to chemicals which produce clearly identifiable resonances within the range of detection. Here it is demonstrated that microfluidic devices, incorporating polarization-controlled plasmonic nanopixels, allow the device response to be tuned to the particular analyte of interest, anywhere within the visible spectrum. This dramatically increases the effective dynamic range and allows local variations in RI to be perceived directly as color changes by the human eye. Active control over the output of the device also enables clear differentiation between a number of different analytes, paving the way for plasmonics to be used for a wide range of real-world chemical sensing applications.