Discrete dipole approximation simulation of bead enhanced diffraction grating biosensor

We present the discrete dipole approximation simulation of light scattering from bead enhanced diffraction biosensor and report the effect of bead material, number of beads forming the grating and spatial randomness on the diffraction intensities of 1st and 0th orders. The dipole models of gratings are formed by volume slicing and image processing while the spatial locations of the beads on the substrate surface are randomly computed using discrete probability distribution. The effect of beads reduction on far-field scattering of 632.8 nm incident field, from fully occupied gratings to very coarse gratings, is studied for various bead materials. Our findings give insight into many difficult or experimentally impossible aspects of this genre of biosensors and establish that bead enhanced grating may be used for rapid and precise detection of small amounts of biomolecules. The results of simulations also show excellent qualitative similarities with experimental observations. - Highlights: • DDA was used to study the relationship between the number of beads forming gratings and ratio of first and zeroth order diffraction intensities. • A very flexible modeling program was developed to design complicated objects for DDA. • Material and spatial effects of bead distribution on surfaces were studied. • It has been shown that bead enhanced grating biosensor can be useful for fast detection of small amounts of biomolecules. • Experimental results qualitatively support the simulations and thus open a way to optimize the grating biosensors.