A Highly Sensitive Optical Sensor Design by Integrating a Circular-Hole Defect With an Etched Diffraction Grating Spectrometer on an Amorphous-Silicon Photonic Chip

Author

Song, J. ; Li, Y.Z. ; Zhou, X. ; Li, X.

Author_Institution

Key Lab. of Optoelectron. Devices & Syst. of Minist. of Educ., Shenzhen Univ., Shenzhen, China

Volume

4

Issue

2

fYear

2012

fDate

4/1/2012 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

317

Lastpage

326

Abstract

We present a sensitive optical sensor design by integrating a circular-hole defect with an etched diffraction grating (EDG) spectrometer based on amorphous-silicon photonic platforms. The circular-hole defect obtained from the outdiffusion of the hydrogen in the annealing process can induce strong resonant scattering loss at some special wavelengths. The positions of resonant peaks will linearly shift with the refractive index change of the detected sample (the sensitivity is 9200 nm/RIU). In addition, the influences of the defect on the sensing characteristics are numerically analyzed based on a scalar diffraction method and a Green tensor technology.

Keywords

Green´s function methods; amorphous semiconductors; annealing; diffraction gratings; optical design techniques; optical planar waveguides; optical sensors; refractive index; silicon; spectrometers; Green tensor; Si; amorphous-silicon photonic chip; annealing; circular-hole defect; etched diffraction grating spectrometer; optical sensor design; outdiffusion; refractive index change; resonant scattering loss; Diffraction; Optical sensors; Optical waveguides; Planar waveguides; Refractive index; Scattering; Sensors; silicon nanophotonics;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Photonics Journal, IEEE

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

1943-0655

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/JPHOT.2012.2188097

Filename

6153091