Temperature sensor utilizing a ternary photonic crystal with a polymer layer sandwiched between Si and SiO2 layers

Recently, one-dimensional periodic ternary photonic crystals have shown outstanding properties when compared to one-dimensional periodic binary photonic crystals. In this work, a ternary photonic crystal is proposed as a temperature sensor. The structure of the ternary photonic structure is considered Si/polymer/SiO2. The transmission spectra of the proposed ternary photonic structure are studied for different temperatures. It is observed that as the temperature increases, the transmission peak shifts toward higher wavelengths due to thermo-optic and thermal expansion coefficients of the polymer. It is found that the temperature-sensitive transmission peak shift is considerably enhanced due to the insertion of the polymer layer between Si and SiO2 to constitute a ternary photonic crystal.