Slow light engineering for high Q high sensitivity photonic crystal microcavity biosensors in silicon

Current trends in photonic crystal microcavity biosensors in silicon-on-insulator (SOI), that focus on small and smaller sensors have faced a bottleneck trying to balance two contradictory requirements of resonance quality factor and sensitivity. By simultaneous control of the radiation loss and optical mode volumes, we show that both requirements can be satisfied simultaneously. Microcavity sensors are designed in which resonances show highest Q∼9300 in the bio-ambient phosphate buffered saline (PBS) as well as highest sensitivity among photonic crystal biosensors. We experimentally demonstrated mass sensitivity 8.8 atto-grams with sensitivity per unit area of 0.8 pg/mm2. Highest sensitivity, irrespective of the dissociation constant Kd, is demonstrated among all existing label-free optical biosensors in silicon at the concentration of 0.1 μg/ml.

► Slow light engineered photonic crystal microcavity biosensors for high sensitivity. ► Highest Q-factor photonic crystal biosensors in bio-ambient PBS in SOI platform. ► Highest sensitivity measured among optical biosensors at 0.1 mg/ml. ► Very low detection limits with compact chip dimensions.