Abstract

Mid-infrared spectroscopy provides molecular fingerprint information for bacterial biofilm analysis, but the absorption signal of a thin biofilm layer is usually weak. In this work, a metasurface-enhanced mid-infrared biosensor was designed to enhance the fingerprint response of Staphylococcus aureus biofilms. The biofilm transmission spectrum was measured by Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy, and the film thickness was obtained by atomic force microscopy using an edge step-height method. Based on these measurements, an effective extinction coefficient was extracted and used in finite-difference time-domain simulations. A metal–insulator–metal metasurface was then optimized to cover the main biofilm absorption bands in the mid-infrared region. Two resonator designs were studied: a polarization-dependent structure and a polarization-insensitive structure. The polarization-dependent design showed a strong response under x-polarized incidence and weak coupling under y-polarized incidence. The polarization-insensitive design provided a more balanced response for orthogonal polarizations. At the selected biofilm fingerprint wavelengths, the highest enhancement factors reached 8.57 and 7.24 for the polarization-dependent and polarization-insensitive structures, respectively. Near-field distributions confirmed that the enhancement mainly originated from localized electric fields at the metal resonator edges. These results provide a proof-of-concept design strategy for enhancing weak mid-infrared fingerprint signals from S. aureus biofilms.

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