Design of a quartz crystal with transparent electrode used for both QCM-D and LSPR technology

This article presents an efficient method for the design of a sensor combining localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) sensing with quartz crystal microbalance with dissipation monitoring (QCM-D). The sensor uses a quartz crystal coated with 7 mm radium transparent indium tin oxide (ITO) top electrode and 6 mm radium gold bottom electrode. An array of gold nanorings is fabricated on the surface of ITO electrode. The gold nanoring arrays cause 12.11 Hz frequency shift which is very small compared with 5 MHz resonance frequency. The mass sensitivity profiles of various types of 'n-m' electrode sensors are compared using MATLAB and the results show that the '7-6' is more sensitive than others. Finite element modeling in ANSYS shows good sensitivity to low relative permittivity in range from 1 to 10. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.