Real-time monitoring of hydrogel phase transition in an ultrahigh Q microbubble resonator

Abstract

The ability to sense dynamic biochemical reactions and material processes is particularly crucial for a wide range of applications, such as early-stage disease diagnosis and biomedicine development. Optical microcavities-based label-free biosensors are renowned for ultrahigh sensitivities, and the detection limit has reached a single nanoparticle/molecule level. In particular, a microbubble resonator combined with an ultrahigh quality factor ( Q ) and inherent microfluidic channel is an intriguing platform for optical biosensing in an aqueous environment. In this work, an ultrahigh Q microbubble resonator-based sensor is used to characterize dynamic phase transition of a thermosensitive hydrogel. Experimentally, by monitoring resonance wavelength shift and linewidth broadening, we (for the first time to our knowledge) reveal that the refractive index is increased and light scattering is enhanced simultaneously during the hydrogel hydrophobic transition process. The platform demonstrated here paves the way to microfluidical biochemical dynamic detection and can be further adapted to investigating single-molecule kinetics.