Interferometer-based chemical sensor on chip with enhanced responsivity and low-cost interrogation

We report experimental results of an interferometric chemical sensor integrated on a silicon chip. The sensor measures refractive index variations of the liquid that contacts exposed spiraled silicon waveguides on one branch of a Mach-Zehnder interferometer. The system requires neither laser tuning nor spectral analysis, but a laser at a fixed wavelength, and a demodulation architecture that includes an internal phase modulator and a real-time processing algorithm based on multitone mixing. Two devices are compared in terms of sensitivity and noise, one at 1550 nm wavelength and TE polarization, and an optimized device at 1310 nm and TM polarization, which shows 3 times higher sensitivity and a limit of detection of 2.24·10−7 RIU.