High-sensitivity optical biosensor based on cascaded Mach-Zehnder interferometer and ring resonator using Vernier effect.

We demonstrate an ultrahigh sensitivity silicon photonic biosensor based on cascaded Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) and ring resonator with the Vernier effect using wavelength interrogation. Experimental results show that the sensitivities reached 2870 nm/RIU and 21,500 nm/RIU for MZI sensor and MZI-ring sensor, respectively. A biosensing application was demonstrated by monitoring the interaction between goat and antigoat immunoglobulin G (IgG) pairs. The measured results show that 1 ng/ml IgG resulted in 0.035 nm and 0.5 nm wavelength shift for MZI sensor and MZI-ring sensor, respectively. This high performance sensor is promising for medical diagnostic applications.

Cascaded silicon-on-insulator double-ring sensors operating in high-sensitivity transverse-magnetic mode.

We demonstrate ultrahigh-sensitivity silicon photonic sensors based on two cascaded double-ring resonators operating in transverse-magnetic mode. Both wavelength interrogation and intensity interrogation methods are experimentally investigated and the sensitivities reached 24,300 nm/RIU and 2430 dB/RIU, respectively. We also show that the double-ring sensors can be simply cascaded to realize simultaneous detection of multiple species, which is very promising for low-cost array applications.