A single dielectric nanoparticle for refractive index sensing

Abstract Refractive index sensing has great application potential in a wide range of chemical and biomedical fields, however, these sensors usually require large-area and fabrication-intense arrays of unit cells. Here, we propose an ultracompact sensor based on a single dielectric nanoparticle for refractive index sensing with a footprint smaller than 2 µ m 2 and numerically investigate its sensing performance. A single-mode resonance rather than multimodes interaction is adopted for the spectroscopic feature of refractometric sensing. The elaborate resonator geometry facilitates the excitation of the gapped-vortex mode and enables the exposure of electric hotspots outside the dielectric. Such design enhances the coupling to the sensing medium, thus exhibiting high sensitivity at the level of 345 nm RIU –1 with a figure of merit of 12.78 per RIU. The single-particle nanostructure together with the single-mode resonance exhibits robust sensing performance to dimension deviations. Importantly, a thin annular beam is employed as the illumination to increase the excitation efficiency of the single-mode resonance, which significantly improves the modulation depth without relying on the near-field coupling of array nanostructures. This work provides a miniaturization platform for the dielectric sensors and other application fields based on enhanced light-matter interaction.