Achievement

Chris Kang’s (3rd year IGERT fellow) research with Prof. Sharon Weiss investigates the design, fabrication, functionalization, and characterization of photonic crystal biosensors. Designing photonic crystals with strong field confinement, small mode volumes, and low extinction losses enables lower loss interconnects, lower threshold lasers, and higher sensitivity sensors. Defects in photonic crystals, which break the periodicity of the dielectric function and localize light, are necessary for these applications, but result in lower sensitivity. By replacing the traditional single hole defect (SHD) traditionally used for biosensing applications with a multi-hole defect array we demonstrated, a significant increase in surface area for small molecule attachment, along with a quality factor improvement, can be achieved. This research reports new insights and structures to optimize optical biosensing employing photonic crystals.