Optical resonant sensors: a method to reduce the effect of thermal drift

The use of a whispering gallery mode (WGM) resonator with an ultrahigh quality factor Q is promising in highly sensitive, label-free, lab-on-a-chip sensor applications. We investigated a novel method of using the differential frequency of TE and TM modes to reduce the thermal noise baseline, which commonly limits the sensitivity of WGM sensors. We studied the temperature dependence of WGM based sensors and experimentally demonstrated the reduction of temperature fluctuation and thus a significant improvement in the practical sensor detection limit. (C) 2009 Optical Society of America