Birefringent porous silicon membranes for optical sensing

Jesús Álvarez*, Paolo Bettotti, Isaac Suárez, Neeraj Kumar, Daniel Hill, Vladimir Chirvony, Lorenzo Pavesi, Juan Martínez-Pastor

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

In this work anisotropic porous silicon is investigated as a material for optical sensing. Birefringence and sensitivity of the anisotropic porous silicon membranes are thoroughly studied in the framework of Bruggeman model which is extended to incorporate the influence of environment effects, such as silicon oxidation. The membranes were also characterized optically demonstrating sensitivity as high as 1245 nm/RIU at 1500 nm. This experimental value only agrees with the theory when it takes into consideration the effect of silicon oxidation. Furthermore we demonstrate that oxidized porous silicon membranes have optical parameters with long term stability. Finally, we developed a new model to determine the contribution of the main depolarization sources to the overall depolarization process, and how it influences the measured spectra and the resolution of birefringence measurements.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)26106-26116
Number of pages11
JournalOptics Express
Volume19
Issue number27
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 19 Dec 2011

Bibliographical note

©2011 Optical Society of America. This is an open access article under the OSA publishing terms: https://www.osapublishing.org/submit/review/open-access-policy-statement.cfm

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