Refractive index sensitivity analysis of gold nanoparticles

In this article, with gold nanoellipsoid, nanocylinder, and nanobar as the research object, we investigated the variation of resonance wavelength and refractive index sensitivity by using discrete dipole approximation. The effects of the particle size and shape on the resonance wavelength and refractive index sensitivity were quantitatively analyzed. We also performed comparative analysis on the refractive index sensitivity of these three gold nanoparticles in order to find gold nanoparticles with high sensitivity. It was found that gold nanocylinder has a greater refractive index sensitivity as compared to the gold nanoellipsoid or gold nanobar of the same dimensions, thus it is more suitable for biosensing applications.