Microfluidic integration of porous photonic crystal nanolasers for chemical sensing

Abstract—We have recently developed planar photonic crystal nanolasers based on porous cavity designs. High-quality factor cav-ities confine light within the pores of the photonic crystal and, thus, our lasers are ideally suited for the investigation of nanoscale inter-actions between light and matter. We have demonstrated the oper-ation of photonic crystal lasers within different chemical solutions, embedded them into silicone microfluidic flow channels, and were able to detect refractive index changes as small as = 0 005. We predict that our porous nanolasers can detect refractive index changes as small as = 8 23 10 4. Index Terms—Microfluidics, optical cavity, photonic crystal, polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS). I