Trapping and Optomechanical Sensing of Particles with a Nanobeam Photonic Crystal Cavity

Lin Ren, Yunpeng Li, Na Li and Chao Chen

Particle trapping and sensing serve as important tools for non-invasive studies of individual molecule or cell in bio-photonics. For such applications, it is required that the optical power to trap and detect particles is as low as possible, since large optical power would have side effects on biological particles. In this work, we proposed to deploy a nanobeam photonic crystal cavity for particle trapping and opto-mechanical sensing. For particles captured at 300 K, the input optical power was predicted to be as low as 48.8 μW by calculating the optical force and potential of a polystyrene particle with a radius of 150 nm when the trapping cavity was set in an aqueous environment. Moreover, both the optical and mechanical frequency shifts for particles with different sizes were calculated, which can be detected and distinguished by the optomechanical coupling between the particle and the designed cavity. The relative variation of the mechanical frequency achieved approximately 400%, which indicated better particle sensing compared with the variation of the optical frequency (±0.06%). Therefore, our proposed cavity shows promising potential as functional components in future particle trapping and manipulating applications in lab-on-chip.

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