Unity Integration of Grating Slot Waveguide and Microfluid for Terahertz Sensing

Refractive index sensing is attracting extensive interest. Limited by the weak light-matter interaction and the broad bandwidth of resonance, the figure of merit (FoM) of terahertz (THz) sensors is much lower than their counterparts in visible and infrared regions. Here, these two issues are addressed by incorporating a microfluidic channel as a slot layer into a grating slot waveguide (GSW), where guided-mode resonance results in a narrowband resonant peak and the sensitivity increases remarkably due to the greatly concentrated electromagnetic fields in the slot layer. Both reflective and transmissive sensors are developed with the calculated quality (Q) factors two orders of magnitude larger than metamaterial and plasmonic sensors, and the sensitivities one order of magnitude larger than grating waveguide sensors, contributing to a record high FoM of 692. The measured results match well with the simulations considering the fabrication errors, where the degeneration of narrowband transmission peaks in experiments is attributed to the error of the microfluidic channel height and the divergence of the incident beam. The proposed unity-integrating configuration with simultaneous optimizations of the resonance mechanism, and the spatial overlap between the sensing field and the analytes shows the potential for high sensitivity bio and chemo sensing.