Abstract
The ability to detect nanoscale objects is particular crucial for a wide range of applications, such as environmental protection, early-stage disease diagnosis and drug discovery. Photonic crystal nanobeam cavity (PCNC) sensors have attracted great attention due to high-quality factors and small-mode volumes (Q/V) and good on-chip integrability with optical waveguides/circuits. In this review, we focus on nanoscale optical sensing based on PCNC sensors, including ultrahigh figure of merit (FOM) sensing, single nanoparticle trapping, label-free molecule detection and an integrated sensor array for multiplexed sensing. We believe that the PCNC sensors featuring ultracompact footprint, high monolithic integration capability, fast response and ultrahigh sensitivity sensing ability, etc., will provide a promising platform for further developing lab-on-a-chip devices for biosensing and other functionalities.
Highlights
Ultra-sensitive and rapid detection of nanoscale analytes plays an important part in numerous fields, such as homeland security, environmental protection, early stage disease diagnosis and drug discovery [1,2,3]
Various optical sensors have been developed for sensing applications, including mach-zehnder interferometers (MZI) [13,14], surface plasmon resonators (SPR) [15,16], fiber Bragg gratings (FBG) [17], and optical microcavities [18,19]
These variations can be put down to local perturbations induced by the adsorption of analytes onto the cavity surface, or global perturbations in the background refractive index (RI) induced a variation in the bulk concentration of the analytes
Summary
Ultra-sensitive and rapid detection of nanoscale analytes plays an important part in numerous fields, such as homeland security, environmental protection, early stage disease diagnosis and drug discovery [1,2,3]. The optical microcavities confine the light in a small volume, leading to significant enhancement of light–matter interaction, resulting in ultra-high sensitivity (S) and a low detection limit. Compared with two-dimensional (2D) PhC cavities, one-dimensional photonic crystal nanobeam cavities (1D-PCNCs) attract great attention for their ultra-sensitive optical sensing and lab-on-a-chip applications, owing to their ultra-compact size, ultra-small mode volume, high integrability with bus-waveguide and excellent complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) compatible properties [25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33]. The high Q and small V enable 1D-PCNC to be an excellent platform for lab-on-a-chip optical sensing based on the resonance mode shift or mode broadening mechanism [19]
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