Sensitivity analysis for improving nanomechanical photonic transducers biosensors

Abstract

The achievement of high sensitivity and highly integrated transducers is one of the main challenges in the development of high-throughput biosensors. The aim of this study is to improve the final sensitivity of an opto-mechanical device to be used as a reliable biosensor. We report the analysis of the mechanical and optical properties of optical waveguide microcantilever transducers, and their dependency on device design and dimensions. The selected layout (geometry) based on two butt-coupled misaligned waveguides displays better sensitivities than an aligned one. With this configuration, we find that an optimal microcantilever thickness range between 150 nm and 400 nm would increase both microcantilever bending during the biorecognition process and increase optical sensitivity to 4.8 × 10−2 nm−1, an order of magnitude higher than other similar opto-mechanical devices. Moreover, the analysis shows that a single mode behaviour of the propagating radiation is required to avoid modal interference that could misinterpret the readout signal.