Optical Transmission Properties of Dielectric Aperture Arrays

Optical detection devices such as optical biosensors and optical spectrometers are widely used in many applications for the functions of measurements, inspections and analysis. Due to the large dimension of prisms and gratings, the traditional optical devices normally occupy a large space with complicated components. Since cheaper and smaller optical devices are always in demand, miniaturization has been kept going for years. Thanks to recent fabrication advances, nanophotonic devices such as semiconductor laser chips have been growing in number and diversity. However, the optical biosensor chips and the optical spectrometer chips are seldom reported in the literature. For the reason of improving system integration, the study of ultra-compact, low-cost, high-performance and easy-alignment optical biosensors and optical spectrometers are imperative. This thesis is an endeavor in these two subjects and will present our research work on studying the optical transmission properties of dielectric aperture arrays and developing new optical biosensors and optical spectrometers.;The first half of the thesis demonstrates that the optical phase shift associated with the surface plasmon (SP) assisted extraordinary optical transmission (EOT) in nano-hole arrays fabricated in a metal film has a strong dependence on the material refractive index value in close proximity to the holes. A novel refractive index sensor based on detecting the EOT phase shift is proposed by building a model. This device readily provides a 2-D biosensor array platform for non-labeled real-time detection of a variety of organic and biological molecules in a sensor chip format, which leads to a high packing density, minimal analyte volumes, and a large number of parallel channels while facilitating high resolution imaging and supporting a large space-bandwidth product (SBP). Simulation (FDTD Solutions, Lumerical Solutions Inc) results indicate an achievable sensitivity limit of 4.37x10-9 refractive index units (RIU) and a dynamic range as large as 0.17 RIU.;Subsequently, optical transmission properties through a self-mixing interferometer array are studied and a novel high-resolution cost-effective optical spectrometer is proposed. The miniature interferometer-based spectrometer is made of polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) with a CCD as the detector. The detected intensity of each CCD pixels contains the spectral information. Since each frequency component in the incoming beam corresponds to a unique phase difference of the two beam portions of each optical interferometer, the total intensity received by each CCD pixel, which is resulted from the addition of the interference signals from all the frequency components in the beam, should also be unique. Therefore, the spectrum calculation is a problem to solve an ill-posed linear system by using Tikhonov regularization method. Simulation results show that the resolution can reach picometer level. Apart from the choice of path difference between the interfering beams, the spectral resolution also depends on the signal-to-noise ratio and analogue-digital conversion resolution (dynamic range) of the CCD chip. In addition, the theory of uniform waveguide scattering is explored to expand the possibility of using such mini-interferometers for performing free-space spectral analysis of waveguide devices. At the same time, the method of least squares is used to correct the pixel non-uniformity of the CCD so as to improve the performance of the spectrometer.;The sensor chip and spectrometer chip introduced here are based on the interference of light transmitted through dielectric aperture arrays. Their compact feature renders these devices ideal for miniaturization and integration as the systems in microfluidics architectures and lab-on-chip designs.