Theoretical investigation of Vernier effect based sensors with hybrid porous silicon-polymer optical waveguides

Abstract

A new combination of porous silicon and polymer optical waveguides is investigated for two different designs of Vernier effect based sensors for the surface detection of Bovine Serum Albumin (BSA) molecules. The hybrid structures studied consist of two cascaded micro-resonators for one and a micro-resonator cascaded with a Mach-Zehnder for the other. Because of its high specific surface and bio-compatibility, we use porous silicon to implement the waveguides in the sensing part of the sensor into which BSA molecules are grafted. Polymer waveguides are then used for the reference part of the sensor because of their low optical losses. We consider the opto-geometric parameters of both waveguides for single mode propagation. Finally, optimized designs, taking into account standard experimental wavelength shift measurement limitation, are presented for both structures. We demonstrate a theoretical Limit Of Detection (LOD) of 0.019 pg mm−2 and a sensitivity of 12.5 nm/(pg mm−2) with these hybrid sensors. To our knowledge, these values are lower by a factor of 8 for the LOD and higher by a factor of 200 for the sensitivity, as compared to state of the art Vernier effect biosensors.