Broadband-Tunable Vanadium Dioxide (VO₂)-Based Linear Optical Cavity Sensor

Sensors fabricated by using a silicon-on-insulator (SOI) platform provide promising solutions to issues such as size, power consumption, wavelength-specific nature of end reflectors and difficulty to detect ternary mixture. To address these limitations, we proposed and investigateda broadband-thermally tunable vanadium dioxide (VO2)-based linear optical cavity sensor modelusing a finite element method. The proposed structure consists of a silicon wire waveguide on asilicon-on-insulator (SOI) platform terminated with phase-change vanadium oxide (VO2) on each side to provide light confinement. A smooth transmission modulation range of 0.8 (VO(2)in the insulatorstate) and 0.03 (VO(2)in the conductive phase state) in the 125 to 230 THz spectral region was obtained due to the of Fabry-Perot (FP) effect. For the 3.84 mu m cavity length, the presented sensor resulted in a sensitivity of 20.2 THz/RIU or 179.56 nm/RIU, which is approximately two orders of magnitude higher than its counterparts in the literature. The sensitivity of the 2D model showed direct relation with the length of the optical cavity. Moreover, the change in the resonating mode line width triangle nu ofapproximately 6.94 THz/RIU or 59.96 nm/RIU was also observed when the sensor was subjected to the change of the imaginary part k of complex refractive index (RI). This property of the sensor equipsit for the sensing of aternary mixture without using any chemical surface modification. The proposedsensor haspotential applications in the areas of chemical industries, environmental monitoring and biomedical sensing.