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Monday, December 3, 2018

Confined whispering-gallery mode in silica double-toroid microcavities for optical sensing and trapping

Huibo Fan, Xiaodong Gu, Dawei Zhou, Huili Fan, Li Fan, Changquan Xia

We propose and theoretically study a silica double-toroid microcavity to confine the whispering-gallery mode (WGM) in an ultra-small space, which consists of two toroid-to-toroid coupled cavities separated by a nanoscale gap region with low refractive index, such as the air gap. Benefitting from the strong field localization of the “slot” effect, power enhancement of symmetric WGMs in the gap results in the ultra-small mode volume of 4. which is quite smaller than the conventional toroidal microcavity with mode volume of about hundreds of cubic micrometers. The confined modes hold the potential advantages over conventional photonic devices, especially in the applications of the sensing and optical trapping. In the application of refractometer, a high refractive index sensitivity of up to 468 nm per refractive index unit (nm/RIU) can be obtained in the 1000 nm wavelength band. In the optical trapping application, the double-toroid microcavity enables a significant field enhancement in the confined WGM, and the gradient force could reach as high as 22 pN/W for a single nanoparticle with the radius of 5 nm. As the potential advantages, this study of silica double-toroid microcavity provides a good reference for realizing the high-efficient photonic applications such as optical sensing and trapping.

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