Slow-light enhanced absorption for bio-chemical sensing applications: potential of low-contrast lossy materials

J. Pedersen; S. Xiao; N. A. Mortensen

doi:10.2971/jeos.2008.08007

Journal of the European Optical Society - Rapid publications, Vol 3 (2008)

Slow-light enhanced absorption for bio-chemical sensing applications: potential of low-contrast lossy materials

J. Pedersen, S. Xiao, N. A. Mortensen

Abstract

Slow-light enhanced absorption in liquid-infiltrated photonic crystals has recently been proposed as a route to compensate for the reduced optical path in typical lab-on-a-chip systems for bio-chemical sensing applications. A simple perturbative expression has been applied to ideal structures composed of lossless dielectrics. In this work we study the enhancement in structures composed of lossy dielectrics such as a polymer. For this particular sensing application we find that the material loss has an unexpected limited drawback and surprisingly, it may even add to increase the bandwidth for low-index contrast systems such as polymer devices.

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