Samenvatting

Integrated photonic sensors are promising devices for various sensing applications due to their low cost, small size, and high sensitivities that can be reached. In this thesis, ring resonators and three-port Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) devices fabricated on Silicon-On-Insulator were compared for the purpose of refractive index sensing. This can be used to make biosensors for use in a lab-on-a-chip or treatment at the point-of-care. Their respective sensitivities and limits of detection (LOD) were determined with NaCl solutions. A sensitivity of 113.07 nm per refractive index unit (RIU) and an LOD of 2.47e-6 RIU was reached for the ring resonators. The most sensitive three-port MZI has a sensitivity of 13051 rad/RIU, and an LOD of 2.76e-8 RIU is shown to be attainable. A three-port MZI combines several advantages of both ring resonators and normal MZI devices, including a constant and scalable sensitivity, high-bandwidth readout, no directional ambiguity, and a simple interrogation setup. Such a device is promising for biosensing, but also other applications like ultrasound, pressure, and gas sensing.

In addition to that, a setup has been built to characterize a three-port MZI fabricated on InP for the purpose of displacement sensing. These sensors have applications in the active stabilization of objects that are required to be isolated from vibrations, such as in nanotechnology fabrication. A factor 20 reduction of noise caused by wavelength fluctuations was achieved compared to previous measurements. Further characterization in a vibration-isolated environment is necessary to attribute a detection limit to the device.