Wide-range, ultra-compact, and high-sensitivity ring resonator biochemical sensor with CMOS-compatible hybrid plasmonic waveguide

A ring resonator-based biochemistry sensor with a wide range, ultra-compact footprint, and high sensitivity is proposed, which utilizes a suspended slot hybrid plasmonic (SSHP) waveguide. The waveguide consists of a suspended Si nanowire separated from a Cu metal surface by a nanoscale air gap. The hybridization of fundamental mode of a Si channel waveguide with the surface plasmon polariton (SPP) mode of Cu-Si interface achieves a strong light confinement, high waveguide sensitivity (S-w), and low optical loss, showing a great potential in integrated optical sensor. The sensitivity, the detection limit and the detection range of the SSHP waveguide-based biochemistry sensor with a miniaturized radius of 1 mu m are numerically demonstrated as 458.1 nm/RIU, 3.7 x 10(-5) RIU and 0.225 RIU, respectively. These superior performances as well as the fully CMOS compatibility enable the integrated optical sensing applications. (C) 2021 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement

Automated summary

The proposed biochemistry sensor based on SSHP waveguide structure offers high sensitivity, low optical loss, ultra-compact footprint, and wide detection range, demonstrating great potential for integrated optical sensing applications.