Performance of Arrayed Microring Resonator Sensors with the TriPleX Platform

Abstract

Integrated-optical (bio) chemical sensors are more and more commercialized, mainly because of their high intrinsic sensitivity in combination with the possibilities they offer for integration in optofluidic devices. The microring resonator (MRR), for example, is a very feasible structure to be used as microarray sensor element for multiplex biosensing. Fabrication of MRRs has been described in the case of the TriPleX platform employing well-defined stacks of stoichiometric Si 3 N 4 and SiO 2 material. This platform allows for a wide variety of applications, due to its intrinsic low loss and its transparency for the VIS/NIR wavelength range. In the present paper, we describe the recent achievements in the characterization of arrays of these MRRs regarding temperature sensitivity, refractive index sensitivity and protein immobilization performance. Furthermore, the use of a reference channel/reference MRR is demonstrated in order to show the advantage of compensation of unintended change in temperature or sample composition. The refractive index sensitivity was determined to be 104 nm/RIU and the limit of detection was about 2 × 10 -6 RIU. MRRs appeared to behave very comparable (expressed as the coefficient of (intra-array) variation (CV)) regarding the response to temperature (CV≈0.3%) as well as refractive index (CV<0.1%). Furthermore, it is shown that protein immobilization onto the different MRRs of the same arrays can be realized in a comparable way (CV<3%). A good comparability (i.e., a low variation) in these aspects allows for the use of internal referencing in order to compensate for unintended change in temperature or refractive index and also helps to attain a high assay precision in the ultimate biosensing application. Ongoing research is focused on the integration of more functionality on chip and further miniaturization in order to allow for fabrication of complex, though affordable, sensor devices.

Portable microresonator-based label-free detector: monotonous resonance splitting with particle adsorption

“…Here ∆θ denotes the angular section of ring where the analyte can bind. The corresponding LOD with Q ∼ 10 6 − 10 7 is around 10 −6 − 10 −7 RIU, which is comparable to the best reported values: 1.1 × 10 −6 RIU in Al 2 O 3 [28], 7.6 × 10 −7 RIU in silicon [31] and 2 × 10 −6 RIU in silicon nitride [41] microring resonators.…”

Zwitterionic dendrimer – Polymer hybrid copolymers for self-assembling antifouling coatings

“…To investigate the potential perspective of the use of such PLL-ZID macromolecular coatings for antifouling purposes, we performed an investigation of the antifouling performance obtained for these hybrid PLL-ZID copolymer approaches. Quantitative protein adsorption onto a surface has been investigated by a variety of techniques, such as surface plasmon resonance (SPR), optical waveguide devices, atomic force microscopy (AFM) and ellipsometry [25,[48][49][50][51]. Here, we first used fluorescence to study the protein repellence of fluorescently labeled proteins.…”