Methods to array photonic crystal microcavities for high throughput high sensitivity biosensing on a silicon-chip based platform

Abstract

We experimentally demonstrate a method to create large-scale chip-integrated photonic crystal sensor microarrays by combining the optical power splitting characteristics of multi-mode interference (MMI) power splitters and transmission drop resonance characteristics of multiple photonic crystal microcavities arrayed along the length of the same photonic crystal waveguide. L13 photonic crystal microcavities are employed which show high Q values (~9300) in the bio-ambient phosphate buffered saline (PBS) as well as high sensitivity, experimentally demonstrated to ~98 atto-grams. Two different probe antibodies were specifically detected simultaneously with a control sample, in the same experiment.