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Highly Sensitive Sensing with High-Q Whispering Gallery Microcavities

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Handbook of Photonics for Biomedical Engineering

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Abstract

As a result of their highly confined microscale mode volumes and ultrahigh Q factors, whispering gallery mode (WGM) photonic microcavities have emerged as a promising platform for highly sensitive biosensing and nanoparticle detection. In a WGM microcavity, light recirculation dramatically enhances the interaction strength between the cavity mode field and the analytes. For practical applications of biosensors, increasing the sensing sensitivity, stability, and detection speed and lowering the detection limit are the main focuses of the current research. During the past few years, various WGM microcavity biosensors with different geometries and using different sensing mechanisms have been investigated. Here we make a review of highly sensitive biosensing techniques using high-Q WGM microcavities, including their general principles, sensing mechanisms, sensitivity enhancement methods, and the recent advances made in the field of microcavity-based biosensor.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the 973 program (Grant No. 2013CB328704) and the NSFC (Grant No. 11222440, Grant No. 11004003, and Grant No. 1121091). YFX was also supported by the Research Fund for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education (Grant No. 20120001110068) and Beijing Natural Science Foundation Program (Grant No. 4132058).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory for Mesoscopic Physics, Department of Physics, Peking University, 100871, Beijing, People’s Republic of China

    Bei-Bei Li, Xiao-Chong Yu, Yi-Wen Hu, William Clements & Yun-Feng Xiao

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  1. Bei-Bei Li
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  2. Xiao-Chong Yu
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  3. Yi-Wen Hu
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  4. William Clements
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  5. Yun-Feng Xiao
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Correspondence to Yun-Feng Xiao .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electronic Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR

    Aaron H.-P. Ho

  2. School of Electrical Engineering, Yonsei University, Seodaemun-gu, Seoul, Korea, Republic of (South Korea)

    Donghyun Kim

  3. Faculty of Engineering, The University of Nottingham, Nottingham, United Kingdom

    Michael G. Somekh

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Li, BB., Yu, XC., Hu, YW., Clements, W., Xiao, YF. (2014). Highly Sensitive Sensing with High-Q Whispering Gallery Microcavities. In: Ho, AP., Kim, D., Somekh, M. (eds) Handbook of Photonics for Biomedical Engineering. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6174-2_21-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6174-2_21-3

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