A highly sensitive ring resonator sensor based on subwavelength grating waveguides for biosensing applications

Abstract

In this work, we present an ultra-high sensitivity (S) refractive index (RI) sensor for biological applications. Silicon on insulator (SOI) ring resonator (RR) based RI sensors have been extensively investigated. Light propagation is studied in the small SOI RRs based on sub-wavelength grating (SWG) waveguides with aqueous claddings. For the device analysis, the two-dimensional conformal transformation method is jointly used with the effective index method. Furthermore, FEM simulations of this structure have been also performed in both the air and water claddings. These good-matched results are further compared with experimental and FDTD results in other valid references. Having found a high data matching between our results and experimental results, we repeat our calculation for different side-widths (d=150-225 nm) and ring radii (7-10 µm). For each ring radius, the best amount of side-width is found. Then bulk refractive index sensing experiments are simulated using changing cladding RI in the range of nc=1.332-1.350 RIU. These RI changes correspond to concertation changes of glucose-water solutions in the cladding. Finally, we obtain the highest sensitivity of 24946 nm/RIU in the case of a radius 7 µm, 500 nm width, 220 nm height, 150 nm side-width, and T of 50 nm between the grating arrays on the RR. It is worth noting that this proposed structure shows 150 times sensitivity enhancement compared to a standard SOI RR-based biosensor with the same radius, w, and h. In addition, the RI sensor suggested in this work shows ultra-high sensitivity in a dynamic range of 1.332-1.352 RIU. This range of RI variation covers almost all the RI variations of the blood components. These results show excellent potential for employing the proposed SOI RR based on SWG waveguides in a liquid-biopsy analysis of patients with cancer. These might pave the way toward the early detection of cancers.