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

Paul Azuelos (1) , Pauline Girault (1) , Nathalie Lorrain (1) , Luiz Poffo (1) , Isabelle Hardy (1, 2) , Mohammed Guendouz (1) , Monique Thual (1)

1 FOTON - Institut des Fonctions Optiques pour les Technologies de l'informatiON
2 IMT Atlantique - OPT - Département Optique

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 molecules (BSA). 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.

Domaines: Science des matériaux [cond-mat.mtrl-sci]

Paul Azuelos, Pauline Girault, Nathalie Lorrain, Luiz Poffo, Isabelle Hardy, et al.. Theoretical investigation of Vernier effect based sensors with hybrid porous silicon-polymer optical waveguides. Journal of Applied Physics, 2017, 121 (14), pp.144501. ⟨10.1063/1.4980010⟩. ⟨hal-01588497⟩