Metal-dielectric-metal multilayer structure with tunable Fabry-Perot resonance for highly sensitive refractive index sensing

Abstract

The metal-dielectric-metal multilayer structure sensor with a transparent top layer and an opaque bottom layer is proposed, which can provide a perfect narrow-band absorption resonance and is suitable for sensing refractive index change of the liquid to be measured in dielectric layer. The Fabry-Perot resonance analytical model that can accurately reproduce response spectrum and theoretically analyze the mechanism of the dielectric layer thickness to tune resonance wavelength and linewidth of response spectrum is constructed. Theoretical analysis shows that the resonance wavelength is directly proportional to the thickness of dielectric layer, and the full width at half maximum is inversely proportional to the thickness of dielectric layer. The analytical expressions for its resonance wavelength, quality factor, full width at half maximum and sensitivity are also given. When used for the refractive index sensing, the quality factor and figure of merit of the proposed multilayer structure based on the 8th order Fabry-Perot resonance are 2162.8 and 1648.1 RIU^–1, respectively. However, due to the influence of the minimum resolution of the spectrometer, the conventional method of measuring resonance wavelength shift to achieve refractive index sensing has a high measurement limit. For the sensing of weaker refractive index perturbation, with the help of superposition of exceptional point degenerate state and tuning mechanism of Fabry-Perot resonance, in this paper proposed is a method of tunably sensing the liquid refractive index by measuring the increase of reflection coefficient or splitting of eigenvalue at a specific wavelength. Here, we take for example the metal-dielectric-metal multilayer structure sensor based on the 8th order Fabry-Perot resonance. According to the calculation results of Fabry-Perot model, when the change in refractive index of liquid to be measured is 10^–4 RIU, the increase of forward reflection coefficient and the splitting of two eigenvalues of the scattering matrix are 0.319 and 1.1279, respectively.