Lasing Enhanced Surface Plasmon Resonance Sensing

The resonance phenomena of surface plasmons has enabled development of a novel class of non-contact, real-time and label-free optical sensors, which have emerged as a prominent tool in biochemical sensing and detection. However, various forms of surface plasmon resonances occur with natively strong non-radiative Drude damping that weakens the resonance and limits the sensing performance fundamentally. Here we experimentally demonstrate the first lasing-enhanced surface plasmon resonance (LESPR) refractive index sensor. The figure of merit (FOM) of intensity sensing is similar to 84,000, which is about 400 times higher than state-of-the-art surface plasmon resonance (SPR) sensor. We found that the high FOM originates from three unique features of LESPR sensors: high-quality factor, nearly zero background emission and the Gaussian-shaped lasing spectra. The LESPR sensors may form the basis for a novel class of plasmonic sensors with unprecedented performance for a broad range of applications.