Micropillared Surface to Enhance the Sensitivity of a Love-Wave Sensor

Surface-acoustic-wave (SAW) sensors have undergone outstanding developments during the last decades. However, for biosensing applications, they struggle to compete with optical sensing technologies. In this work, we present a Love-wave-based sensing platform that leverages the use of the local resonances of micropillars fabricated on the surface of the guiding layer. We demonstrate numerically and experimentally that the Love-wave interaction with the micropillars produces sharp attenuation dips in the transmission spectrum. These dips are associated with the excitations of flexural and torsional resonance modes of the pillars. We utilize these modes to achieve higher detection sensitivity of temperature variation and mass loading using sugar and microbeads concentrations in aqueous solutions. Integrating a lattice of micropillars into SAW-based devices offers a strong potential for detecting low particles concentrations.