Various photonic crystal bio-sensor configurations based on optical surface modes

We design a new bio-sensor concept that incorporates photonic crystal (PC) surface modes to sense small refractive index changes. The initial attempt creates optical surface modes by first enlarging and then perforating the radii of rods residing along the end surface of the square-lattice PC. The strongly confined mode which decays both evanescently along transverse to propagation direction interacts with the substance while propagating along the PC-air interface. Due to index change of the ambient medium, the transmission spectrum experiences linear shift with a large dynamic range. The relocation of the surface defects enhances the sensitivity of bio-sensor from similar to 8 to similar to 93 nm/RIU. The second type of investigated PC structure is based on triangular-lattice PC and it provides a surface state bio-sensor with a sensitivity of 117 nm/RIU. In addition to these designs, we propose a final structure that incorporates air slot along one side of triangular-lattice PC. We succeeded to obtain a new sensitivity value of 396 nm/RIU. The investigation shows that even higher sensitivities can be achieved. The different RIU values are reminiscent of group velocity of the relevant modes which can be extracted from the dispersion analysis. Compact, sensitive and label-free optical sensors based on surface modes may become part of the important applications in opto-fluidic technology and lab-on-a-chip. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.