Topological Sensing with Photonic Arrays of Resonant Circular Waveguides

Abstract

We propose that a photonic array of resonant circular dielectric waveguides with subwavelength grating can be designed as a robust and sensitive topological chemical sensor. The device can detect trace amounts of a given chemical species through photonic edge modes that are impervious to most sources of disorder. We perform a simulation in the mid-infrared that accounts for the absorption loss introduced by chemical molecules in contact with a strongly coupled photonic lattice of resonators. Due to the topological nature of the device, its chemical sensitivity scales linearly with the system size and can reach parts-per-billion range at the millimeter scale. Our findings suggest that topological chemical sensors could empower the development of novel on-chip integrated photonic sensing technologies.

10 pages, 9 figures

References in corpus (2)

• Photonic Analogue of Two-dimensional Topological Insulators and Helical One-Way Edge Transport in Bi-Anisotropic Metamaterials
• Reflection-Free One-Way Edge Modes in a Gyromagnetic Photonic Crystal

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Driven-dissipative topological phases in parametric resonator arrays
• Topological Sensing in the Dynamics of Quantum Walks with Defects