Unraveling Plasmonic Tilted Fiber Bragg Gratings (TFBG): A Journey From “Anomalous Resonances” to Refined Refractometry

Plasmonic tilted fiber Bragg gratings (TFBGs) have emerged as versatile tools for refractometric analyses and biochemical sensing. Their applications have significantly blossomed these last years, from proteins and cellular bioassays to operando monitoring in batteries, to cite just a few. They are widely recognized for their cutting-edge performance and low limits of detection, arising from their dense multimodal spectral nature featuring tens of narrowband cladding mode resonances. Their comb-like spectrum is so rich that numerous demodulation techniques have been reported, without benchmark of their relative performance while they possess important distinctions. This review highlights developments in detangling techniques from the pioneering works based on single-peak analysis up to the most recent approaches involving Fourier analysis, the implementation of machine learning, and cascaded spectral decomposition processes. To fairly compare the different techniques of the literature, we implemented each analysis on original experimental refractometric calibrations, revealing the assets of the most updated methods. This paper therefore reviews these demodulation techniques based on the same datasets, obtained under the same conditions. We show and discuss the results obtained from bioassays and pinpoint the importance of advanced analytical methodologies to maximize the reproducibility, reliability and performance of plasmonic-based TFBGs biosensors.