High-Q silicon microring resonator with ultrathin sub-wavelength thicknesses for sensitive gas sensing

Microring resonators, due to their ability to enable robust strong light–matter interactions within their structures, have garnered substantial interest for their utility in sensing applications, particularly in the realm of gas detection. However, there is an inherent trade-off between a microring resonator's quality factor and confinement factor in the air, making it difficult to balance them. Here, we demonstrate a novel solution with a suspended nanomembrane silicon (SNS) microring resonator. This resonator has ultrathin sub-wavelength thicknesses (0.02–0.03λ), which breaks the trade-off, offering not only a high intrinsic quality factor of 6 × 105 but also an extraordinarily large confinement factor of ∼80% in the air at mid-infrared wavelengths. As a proof-of-concept demonstration, we applied the SNS microring resonator for CO2 gas sensing, exhibiting a sensitivity over 10 times higher than conventional silicon resonators and a large dynamic sensing range spanning from 0% to 100% with a high resolution of better than 4% and chemical specificity. By virtue of its excellent properties, the SNS microring resonator has the potential to open new possibilities for the development of unprecedented nanophotonic integrated circuits, with a broad range of applications in on-chip sensing scenarios.