• The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
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• v.56 no.1
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• pp.156-160
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• 2007

Surface plasmon resonance(SPR) has been widely studied for biological and chemical sensing applications. The present study conducts numerical simulation for the single and bimetallic layer SPR configurations by using the multiple beam interference matrix(MBIM) method to investigate the influence of wave interference and complex refractive indices of materials on optical characteristics such as reflectance and optical phase shift which are used for sensing. First, calculated reflectances are compared with experimental data for validation. In addition, in the single film structures this study finds out the appropriate film thicknesses with minimum reflectance for cases of gold film and silver film. For a bimetallic silver-gold film structure, in particular, the bimetallic film thicknesses that has the minimum reflectance are found 36 nm for silver and 5 nm for gold. From the results, the use of phase shift would be useful compared to reflectance in determining the SPR configuration because the phase shift becomes more sensitive than reflectance.