Using permalloy based planar hall effect sensors to capture and detect superparamagnetic beads for lab on a chip applications

Experimental studies have been carried out on planar Hall effect (PHE) sensors used to detect magnetic nanoparticles employed as labels for biodetection applications. Disk shaped sensors, 1 mm diameter, were structured on Permalloy film, 20 nm thick. To control the sensor magnetisation state and thus the field sensitivity and linearity, a DC biasing field has been applied parallel to the driving current. Maghemite nanoparticles (10 nm) functionalised with Polyethylene glycol (PEG) 6000 were immobilised over the sensor surface using particular magnetisation state and applied magnetic fields. In order to obtain a higher response from the magnetic nanoparticles, it was used a detection setup which allows the application of magnetic fields larger than 100 Oe but avoiding saturation of the PHE signal. Based on this setup, two field scanning methods are presented in this paper. During our experiments, low magnetic moments, of about 1.87×10−5 emu, have been easily detected. This value corresponds to a mass of 9.35 µg of maghemite nanoparticles functionalised with PEG 6000. The results suggest that this type of structure is feasible for building low cost micrometer sized PHE sensors to be used for high-resolution bio sensing applications.