Miniature microring resonator sensor based on a hybrid plasmonic waveguide.

We propose a compact 1-μm-radius microring resonator sensor based on a hybrid plasmonic waveguide on a silicon-on-insulator substrate. The hybrid waveguide is composed of a metal-gap-silicon structure, where the optical energy is greatly enhanced in the narrow gap. We use the finite element method to numerically analyze the device optical characteristics as a biochemical sensor. As the optical field in the hybrid micoring resonator has a large overlap with the upper-cladding sensing medium, the sensitivity is very high compared to other dielectric microring resonator sensors. The compactness of the hybrid microring resonator is resulted from the balance between bending radiation loss and metal absorption loss. The proposed hybrid microring resonator sensors have the main advantages of small footprint and high sensitivity and can be potentially integrated in an array form on a chip for highly-efficient lab-on-chip biochemical sensing applications.