Design of silicon and polymer photonic waveguide structures for sensing applications

摘要

The design of optimized V-groove waveguides for evanescent surface sensing as well as for the exploitation of nonlinear optical effects in low index materials is presented. Morever, the leakage behaviour of horizontal rib-type slot waveguides is discussed, which has been calculated employing MaxWave, a novel simulation package of electromagnetic mode solvers for the computation of the optical field in integrated optical waveguide devices.An integrated all-polymer Mach-Zehnder interferometer based biosensing concept is presented. We show that efficient coupling of light into thin low index contrast single mode waveguides via surface gratings becomes feasible by applying a high index coating on the grating. We provide an experimental verification of this effect as well as homogeneous sensing results.