Optical polymer waveguide based cantilevers for chemical and biological sensors

A novel polymer optical waveguide cantilever-based transducer is presented in this paper. This cantilever-based transducer can be used for chemical and biological sensing in both air and liquid environments. Compared with current cantilever transducers, this particular transducer has high sensitivity due to an internal optical readout mechanism, yet is a simple structure without the need for complex optical adjustments, and can be potentially integrated with circuits on a single chip. Due to a low intrinsic Young's modulus, the polymer cantilever is more flexible than those made of traditional semiconductor materials. Thus, it provides a larger degree of deflection and offers higher sensitivity to the adsorption of molecules, compared to other transducers. A deflection length of 50 nm has been verified.