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🧲 Surface Plasmon Resonance: Watching Molecules Bind in Real Time

Explore how surface plasmon resonance turns a thin gold film into a label-free biosensor, using light to detect molecular binding events at a metal-liquid interface with nanometer-scale sensitivity.

Physics & Mechanics3DModerate60 FPS💧 Water

This simulator demonstrates how surface plasmon resonance responds in real time to molecular binding events at a gold sensor surface within the Kretschmann prism-coupling configuration, showing how the reflectance dip angle shifts as analyte molecules associate with and dissociate from immobilized receptors, and how these shifts trace out a realistic sensorgram curve.

🔬 What It Demonstrates

🎮 How to Use

Adjust the angle of incident light to locate the resonance dip in the reflectance curve, then start an analyte injection to watch the resonance angle shift as binding accumulates on the gold surface. Switch back to buffer flow to observe dissociation, and vary analyte concentration or the association and dissociation rate constants to see how they reshape the resulting sensorgram trace.

💡 Did You Know?

The evanescent field that surface plasmons generate penetrates only a few hundred nanometers into solution, roughly a thousand times thinner than a human hair, yet within that razor-thin zone SPR instruments can detect the binding of biomolecular layers only a few angstroms thick, sensitive enough to resolve single-digit-percent changes in surface coverage.

⚙ Under the hood

Explore how surface plasmon resonance turns a thin gold film into a label-free biosensor, using light to detect molecular binding events at a metal-liquid interface with nanometer-scale sensitivity.

biosensoropticsplasmonicsbiochemistrykretschmannrefractive indexbinding kinetics

3D · Three.js / WebGL renderer · 60 FPS target · runs fully client-side, no install