In-Plane Photonic Transduction of SOI Microcantilever Sensors

Abstract

In this paper, a new microcantilever transduction mechanism for silicon-on-insulator (SOI) microcantilevers that readily scales to large arrays while maintaining a very compact form factor and high sensitivity is introduced. This mechanism is based on differential optical detection of the cantilever tip position in which the cantilever itself forms a single mode optical ridge waveguide differential splitter.