Encapsulation of a Fiber Taper Coupled Microtoroid Resonator in a Polymer Matrix

Abstract

We encapsulated a high-quality (Q) factor optical whispering gallery mode (WGM) microtoroid resonator together with its side coupled fiber taper inside a low refractive index polymer, achieving a final Q higher than 10 7 . Packaging provides stable resonator-fiber taper coupling, long-term maintenance of high-Q, a protective layer against contaminants, and portability to microtoroid resonator based devices. We tested the robustness of the packaged device under various conditions and demonstrated its capability for thermal sensing.

Towards a fully integrated optical gyroscope using whispering gallery modes resonators

“…Fig.4 shows the spectral response obtained during the encapsulation process with the polymer for a given SiO 2 microresonator. On this example a reduction of the quality factor is observed, as it has been similarly observed in [12][13][14]. This result was expected as the penetration depth of the evanescent field outside the tapered fiber, given by d = λ/(2π(n r 2 -n s 2 )…”

Label-Free Biological and Chemical Sensing Using Whispering Gallery Mode Optical Resonators: Past, Present, and Future

“…Once this has been achieved, high- Q WGM systems can be made highly multiplexed with multiple viable sensors in one platform. Recently, a robust coupling solution was demonstrated in a thermal sensing platform where the fiber and a toroidal microcavity were both encapsulated in a polymer matrix [111]. Such a platform would not work well in solution, however because the polymer matrix limits the transport of analyte to the surface of the WGM resonator.…”

Chaos-assisted broadband momentum transformation in optical microresonators

“…For real photonics applications, stability is crucial for photonic devices (38)(39)(40)(41). Time stability of coupling (42) is studied by using two tapered fibers with diameters of 0.46 mm and 1.71 mm, as shown in Fig.…”