Highly selective, compact and efficient vertical in-coupling for interferometric optical biosensors

Abstract

One of the challenges in using integrated optical biosensors is their ability to operate in environments outside laboratories. This occurs, among other reasons, because suitable source coupling components are not considered at the design stage. In this work, a highly selective, compact and efficient in-coupling method is proposed with the aim to develop a genuine Point-of-care (PoC) platform. The proposed configuration consists of a single-mode fiber core placed in parallel and centered above an inverted non-linear taper, which can also be seen as a pigtailed input stage. These components are separated by the cladding of the taper that acts as a gap. In this setup, light is coupled from the fiber to the taper, which then becomes the core of a multimode waveguide. The coupled modes depend on the position of the fiber and the geometry of the taper. For interferometric biosensors, the power distribution between the modes is very important because each one reacts differently to the sample placed on the optical transducer. Therefore, the selectivity of the coupling stage affects the interferometric pattern and, consequently, the detection process. In the model presented in this work, the input is set as the fundamental mode (LP01) of the fiber. Since it is centered, only the even modes are excited in the taper. The width of the taper varies from 2 µm to 3 µm, in order to select only high-order modes, due to their large evanescent tails lead to highly sensitive biosensors. The non-linear format optimizes the design by dividing the entire taper into a cascade of linear sections. Those in which the coupling of the desired modes occurs are prioritized by increasing their lengths, thus making the transition smoother. Instead, the other sections maintain a reduced length. To select other modes or change the power distribution between them, one may just simply change the width of the taper and the length of the prioritized sections. In this work, a fiber-to-taper configuration of 8 mm length is presented, which couples 48% and 17% of the input power to TE8 and TE10 modes, respectively.