Design of an on-Chip Room Temperature Group-IV Quantum Photonic Chem/Bio Interferometric Sensor Based on Parity Detection

We propose and analyze three Si-based room-temperature strip-guided “manufacturable” integrated quantum photonic chem/bio sensor chips operating at wavelengths of 1550 nm, 1330 nm, and 640 nm, respectively. We propose design rules that will achieve super-sensitivity (above the classical limit) by means of mixing between states of coherent light and single-mode squeezed-light. The silicon-on-insulator (SOI), silicon-on-sapphire (SOS), and silicon nitride-on-SiO2-on Si (SiN) platforms have been investigated. Each chip is comprised of photonic building blocks: a race-track resonator, a pump filter, an integrated Mach-Zehnder interferometric chem/bio sensor, and a photonic circuit to perform parity measurements, where our homodyne measurement circuit avoids the use of single-photon-counting detectors and utilizes instead conventional photodetectors. A combination of super-sensitivity with super-resolution is predicted for all three platforms to be used for chem/bio sensing applications.