Fabrication of multichannel Bloch long-range surface plasmon biosensors

The fabrication of a novel optical biosensor based on Bloch long-range surface plasmons on waveguide arrays is presented in this work. The structures are fabricated on a truncated 1D photonic crystal comprised of a 12 period stack of alternating layers of SiO2/Ta2O5. The Au waveguides, are fabricated using a bi-layer lift-off photolithography process including LOR 1A and SPR 955. Grating couplers, as the input/output means, are fabricated using overlaid electronbeam lithography involving a bilayer PMMA process. The planar waveguides are integrated into arrays capable of multichannel multimodal biosensing. The wafer is covered with CYTOP as the upper cladding with etched microfluidic channels, and wafer-bonded to a borofloat silica wafer to encapsulate the fluidic channels and enable side fluidic interfaces.