  Plasmonic lasers provide a paradigm-changing approach for the generation of
coherent light at the nanoscale. In addition to the usual properties of
coherent radiation, the emission of plasmonic lasers can feature high
sensitivity to the surrounding environment, which makes this technology
attractive for developing high-performance and highly-integrated sensing
devices. Here, we investigate a plasmonic laser architecture based on a high-Q
plasmonic crystal consisting of a periodic arrangement of nanoholes on a thin
gold film cladded with an organic-dye-doped SiO$_2$ gain layer as the gain
material. We report an extensive full-wave numerical analysis of the device's
lasing performance and its application as a biochemical sensor, showing that
the proposed design features excellent figures of merit for surface sensing
that in principle can be over an order of magnitude larger than those of
previously reported high-performance plasmonic biosensor architectures.
