We report a high-performance photonic temperature sensor by exploiting a silicon photonic crystal (PC) cavity. Since the PC cavity’s spectra are very sensitive to the refractive index change, we observe remarkable variations of its resonant wavelength and output power under varying temperature levels. In a PC cavity with Lorentzian resonance lineshape, the sensor exhibits a linear spectrum-sensitivity of 70 pm/ ℃ , and the power-variation presents a high sensitivity as 1.28 dB/℃. In addition, the Fano resonance lineshape generated by the PC cavity has also been employed to measure the temperature, which shows improved power sensitivity as 2.94 dB/ ℃. The demonstrated PC cavity-based sensor offers great potentials for low-cost, high sensitivity homogeneous sensing in chip-integrated devices.

Date Published: 31 October 2016
PDF: 7 pages
Proc. SPIE 10022, Holography, Diffractive Optics, and Applications VII, 100222I (31 October 2016); doi: 10.1117/12.2248521

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 10022:
Holography, Diffractive Optics, and Applications VII
Yunlong Sheng; Chongxiu Yu; Changhe Zhou, Editor(s)