We present an optomechanical impact sensor, designed by the utilization of a 2D rod-type photonic crystal (PhC) cavity. The PhC cavity is sandwiched by perfect electrical conductor (PEC) boundaries with an air slot between the top of the PhC rods and the bottom of the top PEC layer. Strong light localization in the air slot region makes the PhC cavity characteristics highly sensitive to the air slot width, leading to optomechanical applications such as impact sensing. A suspended mechanical gold membrane, as a replacement of PEC layers for practical realizations, is designed to sense impact acceleration. In the presence of an impact, the mechanical structure deflects resulting in a change in the air slot height, which in turn, tunes the resonant wavelength of the PhC cavity. Calculations show that 16.6 μs response time, much faster than the commercially available ones (around 200 ms), is possible.
Here, a method to eliminate the trade-off between quality factor (Q-factor) and sensitivity of a one dimensional slot mode photonic crystal nanobeam cavity biosensor is presented. Applied method utilizes an optomechanical feedback mechanism in order to generate transverse gradient optical forces inside the cavity. A pump mode is utilized in order to generate the optical force, triggered by intrusion of analyte into the background medium. The amount of generated force is controlled via an interference mechanism at the output realized by the feedback loop. By utilizing created optical force, slot width of the nanobeam cavity is dynamically tuned and the quality factor degradation due to the decrease in the refractive index contrast of the cavity is compensated by enhancing the field confinement inside the cavity. With the contribution of the slot width tuning to the resonant wavelength shift, sensitivity of the biosensor is increased without any degradation of the Q-factor. Numerical analyses regarding the cavity design and the elimination of trade-off are provided. Obtained results show that the both performance can be increased at the same time.
We propose a novel way of mechanical perturbation of photonic crystal cavities for on-chip applications. We utilize the equivalence of the 2D photonic crystals with perfect electric conductor (PEC) boundary conditions to the infinite height 3D counterparts for rod type photonic crystals. Designed structures are sandwiched with PEC boundaries above and below and the perturbation of the cavity structures is demonstrated by changing the height of PEC boundary. Once a defect filled with air is introduced, the metallic boundary conditions is disturbed and the effective mode permittivity changes leading to a tuned optical properties of the structures. Devices utilizing this perturbation are designed for telecom wavelengths and PEC boundaries are replaced by gold plates during implementation. For 10 nm gold plate displacement, two different cavity structures showed a 21.5 nm and 26 nm shift in the resonant wavelength. Optical modulation with a 1.3 MHz maximum modulation frequency with a maximum power consumption of 36.81 nW and impact sensing with 20 μs response time (much faster compared to the commercially available ones) are shown to be possible.
Amorphous photonic materials offer an alternative to photonic crystals as a building block for photonic integrated circuits due to their shared short-range order. By using the inherent disorder of amorphous photonic materials, it is possible to design flexible-shaped waveguides that are free from restrictions of photonic crystals at various symmetry axes. Effects of disorder on photonic crystal waveguide boundaries have examined before, and it is shown that flexible waveguides with high transmission are possible by forming a wall of equidistant scatterers around the defect created inside amorphous material configuration. Based on this principle, waveguides with various flexible shapes are designed and fabricated for planar circuit applications. A silicon-on-insulator (SOI) slab with random configuration of air hole scatterers is used. The amorphous configuration is generated through realistic Monte Carlo simulations mimicking crystalline-to-amorphous transition of semiconductor crystals via an assigned Yukawa potential to individual particles. The design parameters such as average hole distance, slab thickness and hole radius are adjusted so that the waveguide is utilizable around 1550 nm telecommunications wavelength. Such waveguides on slab structures are characterized here and the level of randomness and band gap properties of amorphous configurations are analyzed in detail. These efforts have the potential to lead easier design of a wide range of components including but not limited to on-chip Mach-Zehnder interferometers, splitters, and Y-branches.
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