Balancing detectivity and sensitivity of plasmonic sensors with surface lattice resonance

Resonators are at the core of optical sensors enhancing light–analyte interaction and leading to higher sensitivities. Maximizing the sensitivity is an obvious objective function for the resonator design. However, high sensitivity does not guarantee sufficient detectivity. When the optical energy budget is limited, as in sensors on mobile platforms, a higher sensitivity usually leads to lower detectivity for nanophotonic sensors. In such scenarios, resonator design requires balancing the trade-off between the sensitivity and detectivity of the resonant sensor. Here, we show the direct dependence of detectivity on the Q-factor and the trade-off between the Q-factor and sensitivity. We study this trade-off in an array of plasmonic resonators. We choose plasmonic resonators because of their high sensitivity arising from large local field enhancements. Then, we show that the detectivity of this sensor may be boosted for limited energy budget applications by making an array of resonators supporting a surface lattice resonance (SLR). We experimentally demonstrate sensing and detection of antimouse IgG protein in a gold nanodisk array–based SLR sensor for various energy budgets.