No Arabic abstract
Recently optical whispering-gallery-mode resonators (WGMRs) have emerged as promising platforms to achieve label-free detection of nanoscale objects and to reach single molecule sensitivity. The ultimate detection performance of WGMRs are limited by energy dissipation in the material they are fabricated from. Up to date, to improve detection limit, either rare-earth ions are doped into the WGMR to compensate losses or plasmonic resonances are exploited for their superior field confinement. Here, we demonstrate, for the first time, enhanced detection of single-nanoparticle induced mode-splitting in a silica WGMR via Raman-gain assisted loss-compensation and WGM Raman lasing. Notably, we detected and counted individual dielectric nanoparticles down to a record low radius of 10 nm by monitoring a beatnote signal generated when split Raman lasing lines are heterodyne-mixed at a photodetector. This dopant-free scheme retains the inherited biocompatibility of silica, and could find widespread use for sensing in biological media. It also opens the possibility of using intrinsic Raman or parametric gain in other systems, where dissipation hinders the progress of the field and limits applications.
We investigate numerically and experimentally the statistics of the changes in the amount of frequency splitting upon the adsorption of particles one-by-one into the mode volume of whispering gallery mode (WGM) microresonator and microlasers. This multiple-particle induced frequency splitting (MPIFS) statistics carries information on the size and the number of adsorbed particles into the mode volume, and it is strongly affected by two experimental parameters, namely the WGM field distribution and the positions of the particles within the mode volume. We show that the standard deviation and maximum value of the MPIFS are proportional to the polarizability of the particles, and propose a method to estimate particle size from the MPIFS if the only available data from experiments is frequency splitting.
Detection and characterization of individual nano-scale particles, virions, and pathogens are of paramount importance to human health, homeland security, diagnostic and environmental monitoring[1]. There is a strong demand for high-resolution, portable, and cost-effective systems to make label-free detection and measurement of individual nanoparticles, molecules, and viruses [2-6]. Here, we report an easily accessible, real-time and label-free detection method with single nanoparticle resolution that surpasses detection limit of existing micro- and nano-photonic devices. This is achieved by using an ultra-narrow linewidth whispering gallery microlaser, whose lasing line undergoes frequency splitting upon the binding of individual nano-objects. We demonstrate detection of polystyrene and gold nanoparticles as small as 15 nm and 10 nm in radius, respectively, and Influenza A virions by monitoring changes in self-heterodyning beat note of the split lasing modes. Experiments are performed in both air and aqueous environment. The built-in self-heterodyne interferometric method achieved in a microlaser provides a self-reference scheme with extraordinary sensitivity [7,8], and paves the way for detection and spectroscopy of nano-scale objects using micro- and nano-lasers.
We demonstrate a thermal infrared (IR) detector based on an ultra-high-quality-factor (Q) whispering-gallery-mode (WGM) microtoroidal silica resonator, and investigate its performance to detect IR radiation at 10 micron wavelength. The bandwidth and the sensitivity of the detector are dependent on the power of a probe laser and the detuning between the probe laser and the resonance frequency of the resonator. The microtoroid IR sensor achieved a noise-equivalent-power (NEP) of 7.46 nW, corresponding to IR intensity of 0.095 mW/cm^2
Highly prolate-shaped whispering-gallery-mode bottle microresonators have recently attracted considerable attention due to their advantageous properties. We experimentally show that such resonators offer ultra-high quality factors, microscopic mode volumes, and near lossless in- and out-coupling of light using ultra-thin optical fibers. Additionally, bottle microresonators have a simple and customizable mode structure. This enables full tunability using mechanical strain and simultaneous coupling of two ultra-thin coupling fibers in an add-drop configuration. We present two applications based on these characteristics: In a cavity quantum electrodynamics experiment, we actively stabilize the frequency of the bottle microresonator to an atomic transition and operate it in an ultra-high vacuum environment in order to couple single laser-cooled atoms to the resonator mode. In a second experiment, we show that the bottle microresonator can be used as a low-loss, narrow-band add-drop filter. Using the Kerr effect of the silica resonator material, we furthermore demonstrate that this device can be used for single-wavelength all-optical signal processing.
An add-drop filter (ADF) fabricated using a whispering gallery mode resonator has different crosstalks for add and drop functions due to non-zero intrinsic losses of the resonator. Here, we show that introducing gain medium in the resonator and optically pumping it below the lasing threshold not only allows loss compensation to achieve similar and lower crosstalks but also tunability in bandwidth and add-drop efficiency. For an active ADF fabricated using an erbium-ytterbium co-doped microsphere, we achieved 24-fold enhancement in the intrinsic quality factor, 3.5-fold increase in drop efficiency, bandwidth tunability of 35 MHz and a crosstalk of only 2%.