High sensitivity guided-mode-resonance optical sensor employing phase detection

We report an ultra-sensitive refractive index (RI) sensor employing phase detection in a guided mode resonance (GMR) structure. By incorporating the GMR structure in to a Mach-Zehnder Interferometer, we measured the phase of GMR signal by calculating the amount of fringe shift. Since the phase of GMR signal varies rapidly around the resonance wavelength, the interference fringe pattern it forms with the reference signal becomes very sensitive to the surrounding RI change. The sensitivity comes out to be 0.608π phase shift per 10^-4 RI change in water medium which is more than 100 times higher than the other reported GMR based phase detection method. In our setup, we can achieve a minimum phase shift of (1.94 × 10^-3) π that corresponds to a RI change of 3.43 × 10^-7, outperforming any of reported optical sensors and making it useful to detect RI changes in gaseous medium as well. We have developed a theoretical model to numerically estimate the phase shift of the GMR signal that predicts the experimental results very well. Our phase detection method comes out to be much more sensitive than the conventional GMR sensors based on wavelength or angle resolved scanning methods.