A Novel Love Wave Mode Sensor Waveguide Layer with Microphononic Crystals

Surface acoustic wave (SAW) sensors have been applied in various areas with many advantages, such as their small size, high sensitivity and wireless and passive form. Love wave mode sensors, an important kind of SAW sensor, are mostly used in biology and chemistry monitoring, as they can be used in a liquid environment. Common Love wave mode sensors consist of a delay line with waveguide and sensitive layers. To extend the application of Love wave mode sensors, this article reports a novel Love wave mode sensor consisting of a waveguide layer with microphononic crystals (PnCs). To analyze the properties of the new structure, the band structure was calculated, and transmission was obtained by introducing delay line structures and quasi-three-dimensional models. Furthermore, devices with a traditional structure and novel structure were fabricated. The results show that, by introducing the designed microstructure of phononic crystals in the waveguide layer, the attenuation was barely increased, and the frequency was shifted by a small amount. In the liquid environmental experiments, the novel structure with micro PnCs shows even better character than the traditional one. Moreover, the introduced microstructure can be extended to microreaction tanks for microcontrol. Therefore, this novel Love wave mode sensor is a promising application for combining acoustic sensors and microfluidics.

Guided Mode Resonance in a Low-Index Waveguide Layer

In this paper, we show that the guided mode resonance can exist in a low-index waveguide layer on top of a high-index substrate. With the help of the interaction of diffraction from a metal grating and total internal reflection effects, we verify that the guided mode can be supported in the low-index SU8 layer on a high-index substrate. Simulation and experiment show the resonant wavelength can be simply manipulated by controlling the geometrical parameters of the metal grating and waveguide layer. This structure extends the possibilities of guided-mode resonance to a broader class of functional materials and may boost its use in applications such as field enhancement, sensing and display.

A Study of Diffraction-based Chitosan Leaky Waveguide (LW) Biosensors

The waveguide layer of diffraction-based leaky waveguides (LWs) must be made of materials that have low refractive index, are permeable to analytes, can be deposited by spin coating, and can...

Polymer Waveguide Coupled Surface Plasmon Refractive Index Sensor: A Theoretical Study

A waveguide coupled surface plasmon sensor for detection of liquid with high refractive index (RI) is designed based on polymer materials. The effects of variation of the thickness of the Au film, polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) buffer, and waveguide layer on the sensing performance of the waveguide are comprehensively investigated by using the finite difference method. Numerical simulations show that a thinner gold film gives rise to a more sensitive structure, while the variation of the thickness of the PMMA buffer and waveguide layer has a little effect on the sensitivity. For liquid with high RI, the sensitivity of the sensor increases significantly. When RI of liquid to be measured increases from 1.45 to 1.52, the sensitivity is as high as 4518.14nm/RIU, and a high figure of merit of 114.07 is obtained. The waveguide coupled surface plasmon RI sensor shows potential applications in the fields of environment, industry, and agriculture sensing with the merits of compact size, low cost, and high integration density.

Tailoring the plasmonic Fano resonance in metallic photonic crystals

Periodically arranged metallic nanowires on top of a waveguide layer show a strong coupling between the particle plasmon of the wires and the waveguide mode. By introducing a dielectric spacer layer between the metallic structures and the waveguide layer, this coupling can be reduced. Here, the thickness of this spacer layer is varied and the coupling strength is determined for each spacer layer thickness by fitting an effective energy matrix to the energy positions of the resonance peaks. It is found that the coupling strength can be very well described by the electric field amplitude of the waveguide mode at the location of the nanowires. We carried out experiments and found very good agreement with theory and our simple model. Using this method, we achieved experimentally an extremely small mode splitting as small as 25 meV leading to very sharp spectral features. Our pathway and design for tailoring the coupling strength of plasmonic Fano resonances will enable the design of highly sensitive plasmonic sensor devices and open the door for narrow plasmonic spectral features for nonlinear optics and slow light propagation.