Effects of reabsorption due to surface concentration in highly resonant photonic crystal fluorescence biosensors

Photonic crystal enhanced fluorescence biosensors have been proposed as a novel immunodiagnostic tool, due to the increased fluorescence excitation rates and angular redistribution of the emission. Among these, purely dielectric one-dimensional photonic crystals (1DPC) sustaining Bloch surface waves (BSW) at their truncation edge, have recently attracted much interest. We report for the first time on the time resolved experimental study of the effects of excess reabsorption of the BSW coupled fluorescence in the near infrared range around 800 nm. Temporally and angularly resolved measurements of the BSW coupled fluorescence emission permit to put into evidence a strong reabsorption of the fluorescence emission when using highly resonant 1DPC. The results suggest that, when designing 1DPC sustaining BSW for quantitative diagnostic assays, it is necessary to choose a compromise quality factor, to exploit the features arising from the electromagnetic field enhancement while avoiding reabsorption.