Spectral Analysis Methods for Improved Resolution and Sensitivity: Enhancing SPR and LSPR Optical Fiber Sensing

Biochemical–chemical sensing with plasmonic sensors is widely performed by tracking the responses of surface plasmonic resonance peaks to changes in the medium. Interestingly, consistent sensitivity and resolution improvements have been demonstrated for gold nanoparticles by analyzing other spectral features, such as spectral inflection points or peak curvatures. Nevertheless, such studies were only conducted on planar platforms and were restricted to gold nanoparticles. In this work, such methodologies are explored and expanded to plasmonic optical fibers. Thus, we study—experimentally and theoretically—the optical responses of optical fiber-doped gold or silver nanospheres and optical fibers coated with continuous gold or silver thin films. Both experimental and numerical results are analyzed with differentiation methods, using total variation regularization to effectively minimize noise amplification propagation. Consistent resolution improvements of up to 2.2× for both types of plasmonic fibers are found, demonstrating that deploying such analysis with any plasmonic optical fiber sensors can lead to sensing resolution improvements.