Low Quality Factor Research Articles

Highly-twisted states of light from a high quality factor photonic crystal ring

Twisted light with orbital angular momentum (OAM) has been extensively studied for applications in quantum and classical communications, microscopy, and optical micromanipulation. Ejecting high angular momentum states of a whispering gallery mode (WGM) microresonator through a grating-assisted mechanism provides a scalable, chip-integrated solution for OAM generation. However, demonstrated OAM microresonators have exhibited a much lower quality factor (Q) than conventional WGM resonators (by >100×), and an understanding of the limits on Q has been lacking. This is crucial given the importance of Q in enhancing light-matter interactions. Moreover, though high-OAM states are often desirable, the limits on what is achievable in a microresonator are not well understood. Here, we provide insight on these two questions, through understanding OAM from the perspective of mode coupling in a photonic crystal ring and linking it to coherent backscattering between counter-propagating WGMs. In addition to demonstrating high-Q (105 to 106), a high estimated upper bound on OAM ejection efficiency (up to 90%), and high-OAM number (up to l = 60), our empirical model is supported by experiments and provides a quantitative explanation for the behavior of Q and the upper bound of OAM ejection efficiency with l. The state-of-the-art performance and understanding of microresonator OAM generation opens opportunities for OAM applications using chip-integrated technologies.

Piezoelectric Response and Cycling Fatigue Resistance of Low-Temperature Sintered PZT-Based Ceramics

The preparation of low-cost multilayer piezoelectric devices requires using cheap internal electrodes between the dielectric layers. A general strategy is to reduce the sintering temperature Ts of the ceramic layer by sintering aids which can form a liquid phase. Here, 0.2 wt% Li2CO3 was added as a sintering aid to tailor the sinterability and piezoelectricity of the commercial PZT ceramics. As verified from experiments, the piezoelectric ceramics could be densified at a sintering temperature above 940 °C, suitable for co-firing with the cheap internal electrode. The optimized sintering temperature of 980 °C can be confirmed for the 0.2 wt% Li2CO3-modified PZT ceramics due to its high piezoelectric coefficient d33 ~ 701 pC/N, planar coupling factor kp ~ 66.7%, and a low mechanical quality factor Qm ~ 71 with a transition temperature of Tc ~ 226 °C, presenting the characteristics of typical soft piezoelectric ceramics. Moreover, both the potential piezoelectric strain ~0.13% under 20 kV/cm and the good cycling fatigue characteristic (>104 cycles) of the studied piezo compositions indicates strong competitiveness in the field of multilayer piezoelectric devices.

A Low Q Three-Phase Series Resonant Converter for PV Applications

In this paper, a soft-switched three-phase resonant converter with a low quality factor (Q) design is proposed for Photovoltaic (PV) energy harvesting systems with a very wide range of operating conditions. Due to the low quality factor (Q ≤ 1), the voltage stress across the capacitors is drastically reduced. However, a major challenge of using a low Q design is the wide switching frequency range required for operation over a wide range of load and input conditions. In order to reduce the switching frequency range, this paper introduces a hybrid modulation technique employing asymmetric pulse width modulation (APWM) along with variable frequency modulation. The proposed modulation scheme also substantially extends the soft-switching range of the converter from full-load upto 10–35% load condition over a wide range of line voltages. To sustain soft-switching in the entire operating region of the converter, the converter is operated in a hybrid structure with single-phase and burst modes at light load conditions. A comprehensive time-domain analysis of the proposed converter is presented, which greatly improves accuracy over conventional frequency-domain modeling. Experimental results from a 1 kW prototype are presented to verify the performance of the converter and validate the theoretical analysis.

Compact asymmetric treatments for perfect sound absorption in ventilated problems

This presentation introduces compact asymmetric treatments for sound absorption, i.e., simultaneous cancellation of reflection and transmission, in a lined duct of constant cross section. The treatments are composed of side by side and sub-wavelength resonators. They are thus compact, which facilitates their practical use. The simplest asymmetric treatment is formed by a pair of detuned resonators that can lead to a perfect monochromatic sound absorption. Furthermore, the combination of multiple pairs of resonators generates multiple low quality factor absorption peaks leading to an absorption plateau. Two compact asymmetric treatments are presented: one is composed of quarter-wavelength porous resonators to prove their ability to achieve perfect sub-wavelength absorption in a duct problem and the other is composed of Helmholtz resonators flush mounted on the walls of a large cross-section duct. In both cases, the evanescent coupling between the resonators has an important impact on the treatments behavior and is thus accounted for during their optimization. The experimental results are found in good agreement with the theory and a mean absorption coefficient of 99% over a large target and subwavelength frequency range is observed for each treatment.

Quasi-Guided Modes Supported by a Composite Grating Structure with Alternating Element Widths

The efficiency of many optical processes is significantly dependent on the magnitude of the electric field. In this context, many artificially made resonating structures have been investigated to enhance light–matter interactions and facilitate the creation of practical applications. While metal–based terahertz metamaterials have been extensively investigated for this purpose, their performances are mainly limited by the poor confinement of terahertz waves on metal surfaces, exhibiting low resonance quality factors. In this work, we propose and investigate a simple yet novel scheme of enhancing wave–matter interactions in the terahertz region by exploiting the phenomenon of quasi–guided modes. The quasi-guided modes with ultra–high quality factors and huge local field enhancement can be achieved by manipulating the guided modes supported by a slab waveguide. The guided modes with the dispersion lines below the light line have infinite Q factors and can not be accessed from external space. By using a new type of composite grating composed of two ridge grating arrays with alternating ridge widths, the grating period is doubled, leading to a folding of the first Brillouin Zone and the flipping of the dispersion lines to be above the light line. Then, the guided modes will be transitioned into new quasi–guided modes with the possibility of free–space excitation while the Q factors are determined by the level of period–doubling perturbation. The presented results of realizing quasi–guided modes can be extended to other structures, providing a novel means of manipulating light–matter interactions.

JPEG Artifact Reduction Based on Deformable Offset Gating Network Controlled by a Variational Autoencoder

For the reduction of JPEG compression artifacts, there have been many methods using deep neural networks. Most of them use the JPEG compression quality factor (QF) as prior knowledge in designing and training the networks. However, since the images we get from the Internet are often recompressed, the given QF is not so informative or misleading. Also, early works validated their methods on low QFs less than 50, while recent smartphones use high QFs larger than or equal to 90. In this paper, we propose a new JPEG artifacts reduction network considering the above-stated problems. Specifically, to extract quality information from the input image itself instead of the QF provided in the header of the JPEG file, we use a variational autoencoder (VAE) and regard its latent vector as quality information. In designing the artifact reduction network, we let the network change flexibly according to the input image quality by employing a deformable offset gating (DOG) network. The gating network and VAE are merged as our overall network, dubbed DOG-VAE, where the information from the VAE is used to adjust the DOG network according to the input quality. The DOG-VAE is trained end-to-end with the QFs in the range of [10,90]. Extensive experiments validate that our method achieves comparable results to the state-of-the-art method for monochrome images and better results for color images. Our codes are available at https://github.com/yunjh410/DOGNet.

Improving Wireless Power Transfer Efficiency Considering Rectifier Input Impedance and Load Quality Factor

This paper presents a method to maximize power transfer efficiency (PTE) in wireless power transfer (WPT) systems with low-quality factors merely based on tuning the receiver-side components. The paper also suggests an algorithm to find the optimum components values considering the effect of input impedance of receiver-side rectifier at high-frequency (MHz) applications such as portable electronic devices. Existing methods often consider the input impedance of the full-bridge rectifier as a pure resistance at low frequencies. However, at high frequencies, the complex impedance of the rectifier should be taken into account since it impacts on the components optimum values to maximize PTE. Despite conventional maximizing PTE methods for series-series and series-parallel topologies, this paper shows that a series-parallel WPT system with low load quality factor requires adjusting the resonant capacitor in addition to resistive load. The validity of the proposed method is verified based on numerical simulations and experiment tests using a 100 mW cm-scale prototype of a resonant inductive link at 6.78 MHz with varying distance between coils. The test results show a PTE improvement up to 40% in a series-parallel WPT compared with the methods that only tune the load equivalent resistance.

An AlN Piezoelectric Micromachined Ultrasonic Transducer-Based Liquid Density Sensor

As an important physical parameter of liquids, the liquid density plays an important role in many applications. As a result, the development of liquid density sensors is critical. However, current liquid density sensors have drawbacks, such as large size of conventional liquid density sensors, low quality factor of microcantilever beam structures, low sensitivity of quartz crystal tuning forks, and high operating frequency requirement of surface-acoustic-wave Love-mode resonators. In this article, we report an aluminum nitride (AlN) piezoelectric micromachined ultrasonic transducer (PMUT)-based liquid density sensor to mitigate the aforementioned drawbacks of traditional liquid density sensors. The PMUT sensor utilizes CMOS-compatible AlN as the piezoelectric material. This sensor operates by measuring the change in resonant frequency of the PMUT to calculate the liquid density. In an experiment, the resonance of the PMUT sensor is measured by a digital holographic microscope (DHM), which allows direct measurement of the PMUT surface displacement, providing intuitive vibration amplitude and mode. Moreover, the DHM-based optical measurement approach has a higher sensitivity than the conventional electrical impedance-based measurement approach, allowing measurement of weak PMUT vibrations in dense liquids. The quality factor ( <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${Q}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> ) value of the PMUT sensor is measured to be 49.38 in water. A high sensitivity of 12.71 kHz/( <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\text{g}\cdot $ </tex-math></inline-formula> cm <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$^{-{3}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> ) was determined for this sensor by measuring the resonant frequencies immersed in different glycerol aqueous solutions. We measured 12 PMUTs and the maximum deviation of resonant frequency between different PMUTs is 9.85%. For the first time, the resolution of the PMUT density sensor is determined to be <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$5.9\times 10^{-{4}}\,\,\text{g}\cdot $ </tex-math></inline-formula> cm <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$^{-{3}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> .

Effect of Successive Heat Treatment on the Performance of Superconducting Radio Frequency Niobium Cavities

One of the primary sources of radio frequency residual losses leading to lower quality factor is trapped residual magnetic field during the cooldown of superconducting radio frequency cavities. It has been reported that non-uniform recrystallization of niobium cavities after the post fabrication heat treatment leads to higher flux trapping during the cooldown, and hence the lower quality factor. Here, we fabricated two 1.3 GHz single cell cavities from high purity fine grain niobium and processed with successive heat treatments in the range 800-1000 °C to measure the flux expulsion and flux trapping sensitivity. The result indicates that although flux expulsion improves with increased heat treatments, there is a noticeable difference between the flux trapping sensitivity depending on the cavity. Evaluation of microstructure maybe crucial to understand the impact of flux trapping sensitivity on cavity performance.

Plasmonic bound states in the continuum to tailor light-matter coupling.

Plasmon resonances play a pivotal role in enhancing light-matter interactions in nanophotonics, but their low-quality factors have hindered applications demanding high spectral selectivity. Here, we demonstrate the design and 3D laser nanoprinting of plasmonic nanofin metasurfaces, which support symmetry-protected bound states in the continuum up to the fourth order. By breaking the nanofins' out-of-plane symmetry in parameter space, we achieve high-quality factor (up to 180) modes under normal incidence. The out-of-plane symmetry breaking can be fine-tuned by the nanofins' triangle angle, opening a pathway to precisely control the ratio of radiative to intrinsic losses. This enables access to the under-, critical, and over-coupled regimes, which we exploit for pixelated molecular sensing. We observe a strong dependence of the sensing performance on the coupling regime, demonstrating the importance of judicious tailoring of light-matter interactions. Our demonstration provides a metasurface platform for enhanced light-matter interaction with a wide range of applications.

Manipulating Dual Bound States in the Continuum for Efficient Spatial Light Modulator

Spatial light modulators (SLMs) that could control diverse optical properties are highly demanded by many optoelectronic systems. Recently, the integration of nonlinear χ(2) materials and metasurfaces has been recognized as a promising strategy for next-generation SLMs. However, their modulation efficiency still encounters challenges due to low quality factor and weak light-matter interaction. Here, we demonstrate an efficient SLM by manipulating the dual bound state in continuum (BIC) with the assistance of a binary-pore anodic alumina oxide template technique. The coexistence of symmetry-protected BIC and Fabry-Pérot BIC is obtained by a desirable sandwich configuration with a BIC metasurface and EO polymer, which efficiently restrain radiative loss and generate a strong quasi-BIC resonance. The assembled SLM with large absorption and Q-factor delivers a modulation depth of 77% and an f3dB of nearly 100 MHz. This dual BIC metasurface provides potential for applications including switches, LIDAR, augmented and virtual reality, and so on.

Super-Resolution Spectral Approach for the Accuracy Enhancement of Biomedical Resonant Microwave Sensors

Super-resolution spectral methods are applied and compared to improve the estimation result provided by biomedical microwave resonant sensors. In particular, the resolution of resonant sensors is revealed to be significantly improved, despite their intrinsic low quality factor. Excellent robustness against noise is also demonstrated. Algorithms are first validated on <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">ad hoc</i> synthetic data mimicking the response of a resonant sensor. Additionally, experimental validation is carried out by using data coming from a microwave resonant sensor, which is specifically designed for blood-glucose monitoring.

Dielectric capacitance and energy storage performances of organic molecule stabilized hexagonal lead iodide with a layered network

Nanostructured lead iodide particles were synthesized by applying a wet chemical synthesis route in presence of aminobenzene and fluoro-aminobenzene as ligands. The ligands were performed as the stabilizer of the particles. Two types of devices were designed using aminobenzene and fluoro-aminobenzene stabilized lead iodide. The dielectric capacitance, AC-conductivity, field-driven polarization and energy storage performances of the devices were investigated under varying temperature and frequency conditions. The electrical performance of fluoro-aminobenzene stabilized lead iodide-based device exhibited superior performance than that of aminobenzene-stabilized lead iodide-based devices. The fluoro-aminobenzene based device showed the maximum dielectric constant value 398 under the frequency of 100 Hz at 80 °C and maintained a low dielectric loss and high quality factor within the frequency range from 100 Hz to 2 kHz. Both the devices demonstrated the small polaron hopping conduction mechanism. The fluoro-aminobenzene based device maintained a fatigue-free unipolar hysteresis loop under 4 kV/mm with the maximum polarization value of 0.21 μC/cm2 and attended a stable charge and discharge energy density for the period of 103 cycles.

Excitation and suppression of asymmetric modes in a coaxial relativistic klystron amplifier with cascaded single-gap bunching cavities

The excitation and suppression of asymmetric modes in a coaxial relativistic klystron amplifier (RKA) with cascaded single-gap bunching cavities are analyzed in this paper. Through theoretical analysis and simulated verification, we find that the asymmetric modes of cascaded single-gap bunching cavities have low external quality factors, the same resonant frequencies, and negative beam-loading conductance ratios so that they are easily excited by the electron beam. To solve this issue, a feasible method is proposed in this paper to suppress the asymmetric modes of cascaded single-gap bunching cavities, under the conditions of decreasing their coupling coefficients and increasing the frequency separation, choosing an appropriate drift tube length between them. These improved bunching cavities are further examined in an X-band coaxial RKA by 3D particle-in-cell simulation, which shows that high power microwaves with a power of 0.8 GW are generated corresponding to an efficiency of 40%. Furthermore, there is no asymmetric mode competition during 150 ns of simulation time.

Design of a novel compact highly selective wideband bandstop RF filter using dual path lossy resonator for next generation applications.

This article presents the design of a wideband bandstop RF filter intending to improve selectivity and compactness. Conventional bandstop filter topology with finite unloaded quality factor produces degraded bandstop filter performance due to dissipation loss. In the proposed filter design, a novel dual path Capacitive Coupled Step Impedance Resonator (CCSIR) structure is used to obtain an infinite stopband attenuation. A uniform impedance resonator is used in Path 1, whereas Path 2 contains a resonator that is twice coupled to the transmission lines. The electrical length of both paths is chosen to be out of phase, resulting in a high rejection level at higher frequencies. It has been analyzed that the selectivity can be improved by increasing the order of the dual coupled step impedance resonator. The proposed design produces a wideband BSF centered at 5.25 GHz with a high rejection level of 104.3 dB and fractional bandwidth of 58.5%. The results have demonstrated that the resonant frequencies are regulated by varying the electrical length of CCSIR. Moreover, it has been realized that out of phase signal cancellation due to the dual path is involved in producing the finite frequency transmission poles, which further enhances the filter selectivity. However, the same electrical performance can only be achieved from coaxial cavities and waveguides due to the high-quality factor. The proposed topology is fabricated and measured on a high-frequency microstrip substrate having a low-quality factor with a compact output and better electrical performance compared to coaxial cavities or waveguides. Due to its high electrical performance and small size, the proposed BSF is appropriate for 4G and 5G (FR1) applications. The measurement shows good concurrence with the full-wave EM simulated results. The fabricated prototype of third order BSF has a compact size of (0.7 × 0.77)λg at 5.25 GHz.

Design of GHz Mechanical Nanoresonator with High Q-Factor Based on Optomechanical System.

Micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) have dominated the interests of the industry due to its microminiaturization and high frequency for the past few decades. With the rapid development of various radio frequency (RF) systems, such as 5G mobile telecommunications, satellite, and other wireless communication, this research has focused on a high frequency resonator with high quality. However, the resonator based on an inverse piezoelectric effect has met with a bottleneck in high frequency because of the low quality factor. Here, we propose a resonator based on optomechanical interaction (i.e., acoustic-optic coupling). A picosecond laser can excite resonance by radiation pressure. The design idea and the optimization of the resonator are given. Finally, with comprehensive consideration of mechanical losses at room temperature, the resonator can reach a high Q-factor of 1.17 × 104 when operating at 5.69 GHz. This work provides a new concept in the design of NEMS mechanical resonators with a large frequency and high Q-factor.

Artificial Tactile Recognition Enabled by Flexible Low-Voltage Organic Transistors and Low-Power Synaptic Electronics.

The advancement of self-powered intelligent strain systems for human-computer interaction is crucial toward wearable and energy-saving applications. Simultaneously, lowering operating voltage and thus reducing power consumption are of particular interests. A brain-like smart synaptic hardware system is considered as a promising candidate for low-power, parallel computing and learning processes. However, the combination of low-voltage organic transistors and energy efficient smart synapse hardware systems driven by a tactile signal has been hindered by the limited materials and technology. Here, by employing an elastomeric copolymer poly(vinylidene fluoride-co-hexafluoropropylene) (PVDF-HFP) with a high HFP content of 25 mol %, flexible, low-voltage transistors (|VG| ≤ 3 V) and a low energy consumption synapse ≤ 9.2 × 10-17 J are devised simultaneously, along with the lowest quality factor (R = Pw × VG, 2.76 × 10-16 J V). Furthermore, based on the low voltage and low power consumption characteristics, flexible artificial tactile recognition system and Morse code recognition are established without any computing supporting. Mechanical flexibility, cycling stability, image contrast enhancement functions, and simulated pattern recognition accuracy of the multilayer perceptron neural network are also simulated. This work recommends a route of exploiting low voltage, low power consumption synaptic systems and smart human-machine interfaces with low energy loss based on flexible organic synaptic transistors.

Simulation on different orientation hexagonal SiC-based hetero-polytype IMPATT terahertz diodes

SiC hetero-polytypes that could be fabricated by chemical vapor deposition etc. methods can be employed to design the power devices. Herein, the 〈0 0 0 1〉(〈1 1 2¯ 0〉)4H(6H)-SiC-based hetero-polytypes are adopted to construct the n+/n/i/p/p+-type impact ionization avalanche transit time diodes (IMPATTDs) and mixed tunneling avalanche transit time diodes (MITATTDs). The DC, large-signal and noise performance of the proposed diodes operating at 0.85 THz are numerically simulated based on the fundamental equations for semiconductor devices. The results indicate that, the diodes with 〈0 0 0 1〉4H(6H)-SiC in each of the i-type, n-type and p-type regions can render higher break-down voltage and conversion efficiency while lower quality factor comparing to those with 〈1 1 2¯ 0〉4H(6H)-SiC in the three regions, the latter devices involve lower noise. The diodes contained 3C-SiC show lower break-down voltage and quality factor while higher noise than those without 3C-SiC. Little difference of DC, large-signal and noise properties between IMPATTDs and MITATTDs is implied due to very weak tunneling through thick intrinsic-region. The present diodes show higher conversion efficiency comparing to the n+/n/p/p+-type devices. In addition, the fabricating feasibility of the proposed devices is discussed. This paper can guide to design the reasonable structures by using suitable anisotropic semiconductors to achieve high-performance devices.

Strong Coupling in Infrared Plasmonic Cavities.

Controlling molecular spectroscopy and even chemical behavior in a cavity environment is a subject of intense experimental and theoretical interest. In Fabry-Pérot cavities, strong (radiation-matter) coupling phenomena without an intense radiation field often rely on the number of chromophore molecules collectively interacting with a cavity mode. For plasmonic cavities, the cavity field-matter coupling can be strong enough to manifest strong coupling involving even a single molecule. To this end, infrared plasmonic cavities can be particularly useful in understanding vibrational strong coupling. Here we present a procedure for estimating the radiation-matter coupling and, equivalently, the mode volume as well as the mode lifetime and quality factor for plasmonic cavities of arbitrary shapes and use it to estimate these quantities for infrared cavities of two particularly relevant geometries comprising several n-doped semiconductors. Our calculations demonstrate very high field confinement and low mode volumes of these cavities despite having relatively low quality factors, which is often the case for plasmonic cavities.

(Invited, Digital Presentation) Rational Design of Nanoplasmonic Array Geometries for Biosensing

Background: Molecular diagnostics provide early and accurate diagnosis, which is essential for the prevention and treatment of infectious as well as chronic diseases. These tests are designed to detect disease-specific bioanalytes such as nucleic acid (DNA or RNA) or protein (antigens, antibodies) biomarkers. In the context of infectious disease diagnosis, nucleic acid-based detection methods are known to provide more specific and sensitive results. Here, the presence of a unique sequence belonging to the pathogenic genomic material is targeted to identify species, organism, genera and/or antimicrobial resistant gene markers. The majority of the common nucleic acid based diagnostic techniques require amplification (polymerase chain reaction, isothermal amplification etc.) of the pathogenic genetic material prior to detection impacting diagnostic speed, complexity, and cost thereby limiting ease of use. Thus, the development of simplified nucleic acid-based diagnostics that can be even used in resource-poor settings may hugely benefit patients across the globe.Nanopath is a molecular diagnostics company utilizing a solid-state nanosensor to enable sequence-specific detection of target nucleic acids without the need of amplification. These nanostructures enable ultra-sensitive biomarker detection using geometric, feature-dependent properties highly dependent on the local dielectric environment, allowing them to be sensitive to low concentration binding events. This paper describes an application of this approach to provide highly relevant clinical information within a single doctor’s office visit. Introduction: The Nanopath team is in collaboration with NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) and NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) to push the bounds of the fundamental physics associated with their biosensing platform. The ability of metals to support electromagnetic surface waves gives rise to surface plasmons when optically illuminated. This property, and its strong sensitivity to changes in the local refractive index, allows for the use of metal nanoparticles as ultra-sensitive transducers. In prior work by members of this team, ensembles of randomly oriented nanoparticles (i.e., colloidal nanorods dispersed on chip) were employed for sequence-specific nucleic acid sensing (1-3). While these particle sensors have the advantage of rapid fabrication, they suffer from low sensitivity and quality factor due to the random particle dispersity. In contrast, in this study we employ ordered array nanoparticle ensembles which can be used to improve sensor sensitivity and figure-of-merit. Study Methods Overview: In this talk, we detail the results of sensing experiments and computational simulations to outline a rational design of the structure of these plasmonic nanoparticle arrays for biomolecular sensing. Through simulation and experiment, we iteratively tailor nanostructure dimension to provide high quality signal and large resonance shifts upon modeled nucleic acid binding.In particular, full-wave electromagnetic simulations were conducted using Lumerical photonic simulation software in which periodic boundary conditions were applied in the x- and y- dimensions for each of the nanoplasmonic sensor geometries. To simulate the resonance response to changes in the bulk solution in contact with the sensor surface, the refractive index of the surrounding media was changed appropriately. Nucleic acid hybridization events were modeled using either using spherical structures approximating the relevant radius of genomic material as estimated by polymer models, or as conformal layers with the known refractive indices for nucleic acids. On the basis of initial simulations, nanosensors were fabricated using traditional electron-beam lithography protocols at NIST. To evaluate consensus between simulations and experiments, bulk sensing experiments were carried out in which the resonance peaks were obtained by submerging the sensors in refractive index standards. Key nanosensor characteristics including resonance peak locations, resonance peak shifts as a function of refractive index, and figure of merit (FOM) of extinction curves were examined between the experimental and simulation results prior to proceeding with simulations on additional geometries and more complex solution conditions, and further device fabrication. This iterative process is repeated toward a rational design of nanoplasmonic array geometries for biosensing optimizing response for targeted disease detection.In summary, this study puts forth a methodology for rational design and characterization of regularly spaced nanoparticle arrays for optics-based biosensing. The results of this study will allow for more informed design of nanostructure geometries towards sequence-specific nucleic acid detection. These improved designs have the potential to improve clinical sensitivity and limit-of-detection across disease indication.