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We report the development of a versatile, cheap and reusable plasmonic sensor able to detect glucose in the physiological concentration range by means of a simple label-free optical detection scheme. In order to achieve the aforementioned goal we applied a self-assembly deposition technique for the large-scale arraying of mesoscale gold nanoshell particles. Different from metallic nanospheres arrays, the localized surface plasmon resonances of gold nanoshells arrays extend in both the visible and near-infrared range, making them extremely promising for their use in biological media. Furthermore, the optical response of mesoscale gold nanoshells arrays showed another remarkable characteristic, which is the presence of various Fano resonances that have the advantage of enhancing the sensitivity of the plasmonic substrate to the external media thanks to their sharp features and increased spectral contrast. The plasmonic sensor was shown to have an extended working range with a good linear response for large refractive index shifts, where a bulk refractive index sensitivity of 0.93 RIU-1 (RIU, refractive index units) was achieved experimentally. In addition, the plasmonic sensor could detect aqueous glucose solutions in the blood concentration range (0-25 mM), with a sensitivity of 0.24 M-1.
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