Hybrid integrated label-free chemical and biological sensors.

Label-free sensors based on electrical, mechanical and optical transduction methods have potential applications in numerous areas of society, ranging from healthcare to environmental monitoring. Initial research in the field focused on the development and optimization of various sensor platforms fabricated from a single material system, such as fiber-based optical sensors and silicon nanowire-based electrical sensors. However, more recent research efforts have explored designing sensors fabricated from multiple materials. For example, synthetic materials and/or biomaterials can also be added to the sensor to improve its response toward analytes of interest. By leveraging the properties of the different material systems, these hybrid sensing devices can have significantly improved performance over their single-material counterparts (better sensitivity, specificity, signal to noise, and/or detection limits). This review will briefly discuss some of the methods for creating these multi-material sensor platforms and the advances enabled by this design approach.

Blue upconversion laser based on thulium-doped silica microcavity.

Whispering gallery mode optical resonant cavities fabricated from rare-earth-doped silica glasses have demonstrated lasing from the visible through the near-IR. However, achieving lasing in the blue has been elusive. In this Letter, thulium-doped silica films are synthesized and used to fabricate toroidal optical microcavities with quality factors in excess of 10 million. Despite the high phonon energy of silica, the high circulating optical intensities present in the microcavities enable upconversion of the thulium, resulting in emission in the blue and near-IR with microwatt threshold powers that scale linearly with the concentration of the thulium.

Ultraviolet light detection using an optical microcavity.

Ultraviolet (UV) light exposure is connected to both physical and psychological diseases. As such, there is significant interest in developing sensors that can detect UV light in the mW/cm2 intensity range with a high signal-to-noise ratio. In this Letter, we demonstrate a UV sensor based on a silica integrated optical microcavity that has a linear operating response in both the forward and backward directions from 14 to 53 mW/cm2. The sensor response agrees with the developed predictive theory based on a thermodynamic model. Additionally, the signal-to-noise ratio is above 100 at physiologically relevant intensity levels.

Simultaneous measurement of quality factor and wavelength shift by phase shift microcavity ring down spectroscopy.

Optical resonant microcavities with ultra high quality factors are widely used for biosensing. Until now, the primary method of detection has been based upon tracking the resonant wavelength shift as a function of biodetection events. One of the sources of noise in all resonant-wavelength shift measurements is the noise due to intensity fluctuations of the laser source. An alternative approach is to track the change in the quality factor of the optical cavity by using phase shift cavity ring down spectroscopy, a technique which is insensitive to the intensity fluctuations of the laser source. Here, using biotinylated microtoroid resonant cavities, we show simultaneous measurement of the quality factor and the wavelength shift by using phase shift cavity ring down spectroscopy. These measurements were performed for disassociation phase of biotin-streptavidin reaction. We found that the disassociation curves are in good agreement with the previously published results. Hence, we demonstrate not only the application of phase shift cavity ring down spectroscopy to microcavities in the liquid phase but also simultaneous measurement of the quality factor and the wavelength shift for the microcavity biosensors in the application of kinetics measurements.