Integrated refractive index sensor based on an AlN-PSiO2 hybrid plasmonic microdisk resonator.

In this paper, a microdisk resonator (MDR) based on an AlN-PSiO2 hybrid plasmonic waveguide (HPW) and its refractive index (RI) sensing characteristics are investigated. The plasmonic characteristics of the MDR based on the AlN-PSiO2 HPW (APHPW-MDR) in near-infrared wavelengths are studied by using the finite element method. Through the structure parameter optimizations, the propagation length (Lprop) of the APHPW-MDR is ∼165µm, which is ∼2.5 times as long as that of the MDR based on the AlN HPW (AHPW-MDR). The simulation results show that the quality factor (Q) and extinction rate (ER) of the APHPW-MDR are ∼621.3 and ∼30dB, respectively. The RI sensing sensitivity (S) of the RI sensor based on the APHPW-MDR is ∼276.6nm/RIU. The RI sensor based on the APHPW-MDR has wide application prospects in high-performance biochemical sensing, and it can also be used in integrated optical filters, modulators, switches, routers, and delay circuits.