Characterization of high index microsphere resonators in fiber-integrated microfluidic platforms

We investigate high-Q microsphere resonators with whispering gallery modes using a tapered optical microfiber immersed in a liquid inside a microfluidic platform. The strength of the coupling between the cavity and the microfiber taper is shown to depend on the contact position of the microsphere along the taper and on the refractive index contrast between the microsphere and the liquid environment. We demonstrate that barium titanate glass beads with index around 1.9 are promising candidates for developing sensor and optomechanical applications of such resonator systems.

[1]  C. C. Lam,et al.  Explicit asymptotic formulas for the positions, widths, and strengths of resonances in Mie scattering , 1992 .

[2]  M. Lipson,et al.  Silicon-waveguide-coupled high-Q chalcogenide microspheres. , 2009, Optics express.

[3]  R L Byer,et al.  High-resolution spectroscopy of whispering gallery modes in large dielectric spheres. , 1991, Optics letters.

[4]  Vasily N. Astratov,et al.  Fundamentals and applications of microsphere resonator circuits , 2009, 2009 11th International Conference on Transparent Optical Networks.

[5]  J.-P. Laine,et al.  Etch-eroded fiber coupler for whispering-gallery-mode excitation in high-Q silica microspheres , 1999, IEEE Photonics Technology Letters.

[6]  Julie Lutti,et al.  A monolithic optical sensor based on whispering-gallery modes in polystyrene microspheres , 2008 .

[7]  K. Hiremath,et al.  Perturbations of whispering gallery modes by nanoparticles embedded in microcavities. , 2008, Optics express.

[8]  Dieter Braun,et al.  Protein detection by optical shift of a resonant microcavity , 2002 .

[9]  Jack Ng,et al.  Size-selective optical forces for microspheres using evanescent wave excitation of whispering gallery modes , 2008 .

[10]  S. Arnold,et al.  Whispering Gallery Mode Carousel--a photonic mechanism for enhanced nanoparticle detection in biosensing. , 2009, Optics express.

[11]  O. Schwelb,et al.  Transmission, group delay, and dispersion in single-ring optical resonators and add/drop filters-a tutorial overview , 2004, Journal of Lightwave Technology.

[12]  M. Sumetsky,et al.  Optimization of optical ring resonator devices for sensing applications. , 2007, Optics letters.

[13]  V. Kolchenko,et al.  Molecular weight dependence of a whispering gallery mode biosensor , 2005 .

[14]  J. Knight,et al.  Phase-matched excitation of whispering-gallery-mode resonances by a fiber taper. , 1997, Optics letters.

[15]  M. Lipson,et al.  On-chip supercontinuum optical trapping and resonance excitation of microspheres. , 2010, Optics letters.

[16]  F. Julien,et al.  GaN/AlGaN intersubband optoelectronic devices , 2009 .