Abstract
Localized surface plasmon resonance sensors in nanostructures have wide applications from medical diagnostics to environmental monitoring. The quality and performance of a sensor is normally assessed by its sensitivity and figure of merit (FOM). Generally, localized surface plasmon sensors suffer low FOM due to strong radiative damping of localized surface plasmon and hence broad resonance peaks compared to that one in propagating surface plasmon resonance sensors. In this work, a 2D array of gold-graphene spherical core-shell nanostructure on a quartz substrate was introduced as a liquid sensor with FOM and sensitivity as large as 102.6 and 350 nm/RIU, respectively, in a gold-graphene hybrid nanostructure. The results showed a significant improvement in the FOM compared to previous works and common surface plasmon resonance refractive index surface plasmon sensors such as nanohole arrays.