Characterization of Silica Nanowires for Optical Sensing

In this paper, the optical properties of silica nanowires in a Mach-Zehnder-based optical sensor for detecting biomaterial specimens have been studied using the full vectorial H-field formulation of the finite element method. The variation of the propagation constant, the power fraction in the composite nanowires with the variation of the nanowire size and the specimen refractive index, temperature, and wavelength are also presented.