A high sensitivity pressure sensor based on two-dimensional photonic crystal

In this paper, we propose and simulate a pressure sensor based on two-dimensional photonic crystal with the high quality factor and sensitivity. The sensor is formed by the coupling of two photonic crystal based waveguides and one nanocavity. The photonic crystal with the triangular lattice is composed of GaAs rods. The detailed structures of the waveguides and nanocavity are optimized to achieve better quality factor and sensitivity of the sensor. For the optimized structures, the resonant wavelength of the sensor has a linear redshift as increasing the applied pressure in the range of 0–2 GPa, and the quality factor keeps unchanged nearly. The optimized quality factor is around 1500, and the sensitivity is up to 13.9 nm/GPa.