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Patent abstract
An in silico process to identify a nanostructured plasmonic sensor design includes the following operational steps: selection of an analyte; characterization of the analyte using computational techniques; selection of at least one two- or three-dimensional nanostructured substrate with plasmonic characteristics; characterization of each substrate using computational techniques; and performing an interaction potential mapping between the analyte and each substrate so as to identify, for each region and/or each atom of each substrate, an interaction value with the analyte; calculating the spectral signal of the analyte adsorbed on each substrate for at least one region and/or one atom of each substrate; analytically evaluating an enhancement factor of each calculated spectral signal; and comparing each enhancement factor with a corresponding predefined minimum threshold value in order to assess whether the associated nanostructured plasmonic sensor is configured to perform analyte detection with single-molecule sensitivity.