Nowadays, the increasing concern for environmental analysis and food quality control, as well as medical needs such as fast diagnosis in case of emergency events, leads to a growing need for new generations of chemical and biological sensors. These devices should have high sensitivity and reliability, perform specific detection of molecules and enable multiple parallel sensing, while being cheap, portable, fast and easy to use. Thus, a general trend tends towards bio-chemical sensors which are on-chip integrated, label-free, and compatible with standard micro-technologies. Photonic dielectric devices based on porous silicon and metallic nanostructures based on plasmon resonances are good candidates to fulfill the above requirements. Porous silicon is a biocompatible material, with a huge specific surface providing a sensitivity enhancement by several orders of magnitude compared to bulk materials; furthermore, its refractive index and thickness can be easily tuned, enabling for the realization of a large variety of photonic designs. Metallic nanostructures provide high confinement and strong field enhancement in sub-wavelength regions, leading to high sensitivities; combined with fluorescence or other sensing mechanisms such as Raman or IR spectroscopy, they have already demonstrated increased sensing potential. The realization of a hybrid device combining both elements would be highly interesting, since it could yield the advantages of both elements, and the photonic structure could shape the plasmonic resonance to develop ultrasensitive devices with narrow resonance linewidth and increased sensing depth. In this context, we realized and studied a novel hybrid photonic / plasmonic device exploiting the coupling between the surface plasmon resonance of a bowtie nano - antenna (NAs) array and the photonic modes of porous silicon (PSi) interferometer. We designed and fabricated a NAs array with resonance wavelength ~ 1.3μm on a homogeneous PSi interferometer. A thin spacing silica layer with controllable density protects the pores of PSi layer and provides a smooth surface for the fabrication of NAs. The coupling mechanisms of two elements - NA array and interferometer, are studied with 2 models, which are interferometer approach and resonator approach. The interferometer approach is focused on studying the influence of NAs array as a homogeneous layer on the fringes shift of the interferometer. For resonator approach, the coupled mode theory is applied. With these models, strong coupling between both elements are discovered: splitting. In the case of viii smaller environment variation, the hybrid device gains 5-10 fold sensitivity enhancement vs. 2 elements alone. The controllable SiO2 layer allows us to sense the index variation within PSi interferometer. This opens a route towards double parallel sensing. The development of the theoretical models under different environment is ongoing, which is expected to utilize the strong coupling for the sensing. A further investigation of the sensing potential of the hybrid device would be expected. And the 2 elements constituting the hybrid structure - the interferometer and the NA array - could be modified in order to enlarge the study to a wider family of devices with greater properties and performances. This work was performed within the framework of the program "Groups of Five Ecoles Centrales" between China Scholarship Council (CSC) and Lyon Institute of Nanotechnologies (INL, CNRS UMR 5270). The project has been supported by the Nanolyon technology platform at INL.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:CCSD/oai:tel.archives-ouvertes.fr:tel-01064196 |
| Date | 20 November 2013 |
| Creators | Liu, Huanhuan |
| Publisher | Ecole Centrale de Lyon |
| Source Sets | CCSD theses-EN-ligne, France |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | PhD thesis |
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