An efficient optical biochemical sensor based on a polyatomic photonic crystal ring resonator

In this paper, we introduce and investigate a design concept for a polyatomic photonic crystal ring resonator (PCRR). In contrast to conventional sensors, this PCRR comprises two different branching waveguides (WG), which are all oriented in the same lattice direction, but with different optical propagation properties due to the binary nature of the diatomic square lattice. Based on this new scheme, an on-chip biochemical sensor is proposed. Electromagnetic analysis, PWE and FDTD numerical techniques, were used to investigate the sensing performance. Our results show that such a sensor can efficiently detect small changes in the refractive index within the sensing area.