Compact on-chip temperature sensors based on dielectric-loaded plasmonic waveguide-ring resonators

Abstract

The application of a waveguide-ring resonator based on dielectric-loaded surface plasmon-polariton waveguides as a temperature sensor is demonstrated in this paper and the influence of temperature change to the transmission through the waveguide-ring resonator system is comprehensively analyzed. The results show that the roundtrip phase change in the ring resonator due to the temperature change is the major reason for the transmission variation. The performance of the temperature sensor is also discussed and it is shown that for a waveguide-ring resonator with the resonator radius around 5 μm and waveguide-ring gap of 500 nm which gives a footprint around 140 μm2, the temperature sensitivity at the order of 10-2 K can be achieved with the input power of 100 μW within the measurement sensitivity limit of a practical optical detector. © 2011 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.