High quality factor and high sensitivity photonic crystal rectangular holes slot nanobeam cavity with parabolic modulated lattice constant for refractive index sensing

In this paper, we present a novel optical sensor based on photonic crystal slot nanobeam cavity (PCSNC) with rectangular air holes. By introducing a continuous slot and quadratically modulated hole spacing (lattice constant a) structure, the majority of the optical field is localized in the slot region, which enhances the light-matter interaction. With applying the three dimensional finite-difference time-domain (3D-FDTD) simulations, three key geometric parameters (hole width wx, slot width ws and the number of the holes N) are optimized to achieve a high sensitivity (S) while keeping a high quality (Q) factor. The highest S over 1000 nm/RIU (refractive index unit) is achieved when the slot width equals to 200 nm. The highest Q-factor of 2.15×107 is obtained when 30 holes are placed on both sides of the host waveguide with the slot width of 80 nm. Considering the transmission efficiency and the trade-off between S and Q-factor, the slot width and the number of the tapered region are chosen as 80 nm and 20, respectively. A high S approximately 835 nm/RIU and a Q-factor about 5.50×105 with small effective mode volume of 0.03(λ/nair)3 are achieved simultaneously, resulting in an ultra-high figure-of-merit (FOM) above 2.92×105. Furthermore, the active sensing region of the optimized structure occupies only about 12 µm×0.08 µm, which makes the device attractive for realizing on-chip integrated sensor arrays.