Abstract
The investigation of surface plasmon resonance by several measurement systems based on the measurement of intensity or the measurement of phase are described in this dissertation. The measurement systems consist of (1) an optical intensity-based system, (2) an intensity-based interferometric system, (3) a heterodyne interferometric system, and (4) a novel common-path heterodyne interferometric system. The former two are based on the measurement of intensity while the others are based one the measurement of phase. Among them, the novel common-path heterodyne interferometric system, which is built with a pair of quarter waveplates to improve the measurement sensitivity, is my original design.The surface plasmon resonance for each measurement system is theoretical and experiment verified. The results from each system are used to make a comparism. In effect, the most sensitive one is my original design, the novel common-path heterodyne interferomatic system. The measurement resolution of refractive index for this system is theoretically estimated to be 4×10-9RIU(refractive index unit). An experiment result of 3.4×10-6RIU has been achieved by this study. Furthermore, a protein-protein interaction experiment is also included. So far, the detection limit for protein of 0.3μg/ml has been obtained. Both the measurement resolution and the detection limit for protein have a great space to improve in the near future.