| This work reports the theory, design, fabrication, and characterization of highly-compliant polymer-based guided-mode resonance (GMR) grating devices. GMR devices have been widely researched in recent years for their applications in telecommunications and biosensing. The vast majority of GMR-based sensors are fabricated and characterized on rigid transparent substrates, and are designed to respond to changes in the optical properties of their surrounding media. While useful in a number of conventional sensing configurations, the applications of rigid gratings for mechanical sensing are extremely limited. To enable a GMR sensor to respond to mechanical stimuli, both the grating and its substrate must be compliant, a property inherent to the devices presented herein.;An extensive toolset is required for the design of such resonant optical devices; this dissertation defines the theoretical and simulations models used for the analysis of these dynamic grating devices, and provides a clear understanding of both their strengths and limitations. These tools include a waveguide-theory based theoretical model for rapid approximation of grating resonance conditions, and finite element method (FEM) simulation for full-field solutions to Maxwell's equations.;A number of challenges which arise when attempting to fabricate nanostructures on a thin polymer are also addressed, and a fabrication process is developed to enable a practical embodiment of the proposed devices. The results of this process are subwavelength titanium dioxide (TiO2) gratings embedded at the surface of compliant polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) structures. Both a one-dimensional, membrane-embedded GMR grating for local measurement of microfluidic channel pressure, and a two-dimensional, slab-embedded GMR grating for biaxial strain detection are discussed, demonstrated, and evaluated. Additionally, potential improvements to the devices' performance and suggestions for future work are provided. |
