Tunable Fano-Resonant Metasurfaces on a Disposable Plastic-Template for Multimodal and Multiplex Biosensing

Metasurfaces are engineered nanostructured interfaces that extend the photonic behavior of natural materials, and they spur many breakthroughs in multiple fields, including quantum optics, optoelectronics, and biosensing. Recent advances in metasurface nanofabrication enable precise manipulation of light–matter interactions at subwavelength scales. However, current fabrication methods are costly and time-consuming and have a small active area with low reproducibility due to limitations in lithography, where sensing nanosized rare biotargets requires a wide active surface area for efficient binding and detection. Here, a plastic-templated tunable metasurface with a large active area and periodic metal–dielectric layers to excite plasmonic Fano resonance transitions providing multimodal and multiplex sensing of small biotargets, such as proteins and viruses, is introduced. The tunable Fano resonance feature of the metasurface is enabled via chemical etching steps to manage nanoperiodicity of the plastic template decorated with plasmonic layers and surrounding dielectric medium. This metasurface integrated with microfluidics further enhances the light–matter interactions over a wide sensing area, extending data collection from 3D to 4D by tracking real-time biomolecular binding events. Overall, this work resolves cost- and complexity-related large-scale fabrication challenges and improves multilayer sensitivity of detection in biosensing applications.